“She will be free,” I say. “Thank God that at least she will be free.”
In July I finally receive a reply from my aunt Bess. She writes to me under her new seal, a lion rampant. I smile as I look at it and break the seal. I like to think of my aunt Bess with a rampant lion as her crest, it’s very apt.
Dearest Mary, I am sorry that I cannot give you a better answer for I should be glad to have you at my home (at any one of my many homes!) for the love that I bear your mother and yourself, dear Mary. But before I could ask the queen if I might house you, she has asked me to undertake a greater task than keeping you. My husband, the earl, and I are to take a house guest—perhaps you can guess who? And we are to keep her safe, and keep her from our enemies, and watch over her letters, and report on all that she does. She is to be a guest but she is not to leave until we return her to Scotland. She is to be a guest but we are to inquire into every letter that she has in her casket, and discover everything that we can, and then judge as we see fit.
You will guess by now who is coming into my keeping, and why I cannot invite you! The queen is trusting my husband, the earl, and me to keep Mary Queen of Scots safe in our keeping until such time as the queen is ready to return her to Scotland. We will do this without error, and imagine what honor and profit it will be for us to house the Queen of Scots and to return her to her throne. When she has gone back to Scotland, I will ask the queen if you may be freed to live in one of our little houses with great pleasure.
I drop the letter to the floor. I feel as sick as the day that Katherine was taken to the Tower and Elizabeth had me hand her her gloves. “She will never get away,” I predict. “Mary Queen of Scots will never get away. Elizabeth has her in her web, as she has me. Both of us will die in our prisons.”
GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE,
LINCOLNSHIRE, CHRISTMAS 1568
It is a bright cold Christmas at Grimsthorpe and my stepgrandmother is with the court so her household and I celebrate the season quietly in her absence. I am allowed to walk in the gardens, down to the stables and all around the courtyard of the beautiful castle, but when the snow falls and the drifts lie thick in the lanes, I cannot go farther. I don’t mind being imprisoned by snowdrifts, I know that a thaw will come.
My stepgrandmother sends me one letter with a Christmas gift of a gold cup and tells me the news. She writes carefully, so that no spy can claim that she is conspiring with me.
I have happy news of Ned Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, she writes, avoiding reiterating any claim that he is my brother-in-law. He has been released from imprisonment and is able to live freely at his home in Wiltshire, Wulf Hall. His sons, Teddy and Thomas, remain with their grandmother at Hanworth, but they can write to their father, and they may write and receive letters from you. I know this will give you great joy.
I pause in my reading and think of my little nephews, Katherine’s sons, and of their father still parted from them, but able at least to write to each other. Truly, Elizabeth has become a monstrously powerful queen. We are all placed only where she will allow us to be.
My stepgrandmother makes it clear that the inquiry that was to examine the treason of Mary Queen of Scots’ wicked half brother has been turned around completely. Lord Moray has supplied the inquiry with a casket of letters that are said to prove that the queen was her husband’s murderer, and Bothwell’s adulterous lover. It is not the treasonous half brother but the queen herself who is on trial—as Elizabeth swore she would never be.
The letters do not all appear to be in her true handwriting, my stepgrandmother tactfully explains. So some people doubt they are hers.
I am very sure of this. I imagine that William Cecil’s spies are cutting and copying letters like good children bent over their schoolbooks in a frenzy of forgery. But in any case, Elizabeth lacks the courage to come to a definite conclusion and we enter the new year with the Scots queen and me in confinement in our separate prisons, me at Grimsthorpe, she at Bolton Castle, dressed in her royal finery, which she insisted was sent on from Lochleven, both of us hoping for our freedom with the spring.
She does more than hope: she writes to Philip II of Spain, claiming that she is being held, without cause, by Elizabeth. This may gain her freedom, but will certainly win her the absolute enmity of William Cecil and all Protestants. Unlike her, I have no one to write to. My only royal kinswoman is my only enemy: Elizabeth.
GRIMSTHORPE CASTLE,
LINCOLNSHIRE, SPRING 1569
I can hardly believe that the day has come, but it is spring, the land is unlocked from winter, the streams are running alongside the lane, and both my imprisoned cousin Mary Queen of Scots and I are to be freed. The season that has always called to me in the singing birds is the season that will see me walk free. Queen Mary is to return to Scotland and take up her throne. The inquiry against her has collapsed, and Elizabeth knows she cannot keep her royal cousin locked up with no good reason. She is not even going to keep me locked up, and I don’t have Philip II and the Catholic kings advocating for me. It is as if Elizabeth has looked into the horror that she was making, seen the road she was walking. If she proved the case against her cousin Mary, she would have had to execute her. If she continued to imprison me indefinitely, what is it but a death sentence? Changeable, fearful, Elizabeth turns from persecuting her heirs to setting us free in the hope that Mary in Edinburgh and I far away will trouble her less than when she holds us captive.
“You are to go to Sir Thomas Gresham,” my stepgrandmother says. “I shall miss you, my dear, but I shall be glad to know that you are staying in London, and when there is next a vacancy at court, you will become a lady-in-waiting. You will return to your former place.”
“She thinks that I will return to serve her?” I ask incredulously.
My stepgrandmother laughs. “You will. It is the best way to demonstrate that you are no danger to her, you are no rival. Remember her own sister imprisoned her and then called her to court. She thinks she can do the same with you.”
“But I will be free?”
“You will be free.”
I take her hands. “I will never forget that you took me in,” I tell her.
“That was nothing,” she says wryly. “Don’t forget that I took the damned monkey, too.”
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, SUMMER 1569
I ride to London through the richest lands of England. On either side of the track the hayfields have been freshly mown, and I can smell the dizzying smell of green hay. On the hills beyond the fields the sheep are flocking with their fat lambs under the careless supervision of the shepherd boys. In the water meadows beside the river the cows are grazing on the lush grass, and when we ride past them in the evening we see the girls going out with their pails on yokes, carrying their milking stools.
I am so happy to be on horseback that I don’t want the journey to end, but before long we go through the Bishopsgate and there is the beautiful large house built by Sir Thomas, using the fortune he has earned by advising my family, the Tudors, how to do business. It was Sir Thomas who warned the queen that she must recall the bad currency and issue good, it was Sir Thomas who lived at Antwerp and guarded the interests of the English merchants against our greatest trading partner, and it was Sir Thomas who advised the building of a great hall in London where merchants could meet and exchange news, confirm the licenses and monopolies, and buy into each other’s companies.