I christen my baby Thomas Seymour, but no one is allowed into the Tower for his baptism. His godparents are two of the Tower guards, who give him his name at the font in the Tower chapel as my lady-in-waiting holds him. They bring him back to me with his little soul saved, but there is no one to church me. I think that I am surely a good Protestant, for here is another of the sacraments of the old Church that I am refusing. I get up out of bed and wash myself and change my linen and pray in private, and it is done.
I can get no news except the court gossip that Mrs. Rother brings me. She tells me that my cousin Lady Margaret Douglas and her fragile husband, Matthew Stuart, are living quietly at their home, keeping their heads down as Elizabeth’s displeasure blows over them. Now that they are freed—who were guilty of so much—the people of London are even angrier about my imprisonment, and now people start to say that my sister Jane was with child in the Tower, just like me, and her baby was killed when she died. I hate the way they use her name, but I am touched that they remember her as a martyr and say she would have given them a boy and an heir for England. They say that I, too, am unjustly imprisoned. The very people who called for “Our Elizabeth” to be a savior for the reformed religion in England now swear that she has become as bad as the persecutors were before. They say that she is torturing the sister of their Protestant martyr. Her army has failed in France, and failed to defend the Protestants, and now her defeated troops are straggling home, wounded, unpaid, miserably mutinous, their ranks ravaged by a terrible outbreak of plague.
But the most extraordinary news comes not from Mrs. Rother, but from my little maid Lucy, who had it from the poor lieutenant’s cook, who had it from one of the royal cooks, direct from the royal dinner table. In an attempt to reverse the opinion of everyone, and make her a safe choice of heir, Elizabeth is going to order Robert Dudley to marry Mary Queen of Scots.
It drives me quite mad not to be able to tell this to Ned, imprisoned in the White Tower and unable to come to me. He would laugh and laugh with me over this insane proposal. Elizabeth must have lost her mind to think of proposing her shamed lover to another queen, especially one who is so grand and on her dignity. Mary Queen of Scots has been offered Don Carlos—the heir to Spain. Why would she consider one of Elizabeth’s subjects? And one so tainted by such scandal? But Elizabeth is so desperate to avoid my rightful claim to the throne that she has hatched this impossible plot so that I can be put aside in favor of a shamed favorite and a papist Frenchwoman, whose family has just defeated our English army.
Elizabeth goes further. She proposes that she and Mary shall somehow live together, that she and Dudley and Mary shall all live together in some great palace. They shall be two queens sharing a court, sharing an island, and presumably Robert will be shared, too. It is an extraordinary, scandalous, mad idea, and I imagine the Privy Council, William Cecil, and Robert Dudley himself tearing their hair out of their heads.
Apparently, Elizabeth writes letters to Mary (the city is full of gossip): flirtatious letters, like those written from a lover to his mistress. She is going to send her a diamond ring, like a betrothal ring. She promises eternal love and friendship. She says that if Mary is ever in need or in danger, she shall summon her potent fellow queen and Elizabeth will come to her—without fail. Elizabeth is doing what she does best—encouraging lust for her political ends.
And then—just like her father, who favored one man over another, so that they would hate each other—Elizabeth now turns to Margaret Douglas, our disgraced cousin, and shows the world that she prefers her to me as an English-born heir. Lady Margaret never had to face her accusers like I did. The testimonies of those who said that she employed soothsayers and necromancers to foretell Elizabeth’s death have all been dismissed. She was released from prison without a stain on her character and now up she pops at court, received with favor, her son the pretty boy Henry Stuart, back from France, towed everywhere in her broad-beamed wake, like a dainty sailing ship after a barge. Margaret Douglas suggests to everyone that Henry Stuart would be a suitable husband for the Queen of Scots—the very idea that gave royal offense earlier!—but now it can be spoken, now it can be considered. Robert Dudley, for one, will favor such a misalliance, if only to spare himself.
It is madness to ask what a madwoman thinks. It is folly to interrogate a fool. But really—what is the queen thinking, that she would forgive a traitor, jeopardize her own throne, lose her lover, and name her enemy as an heir—just to prevent me coming to the throne after her death? I have always found her inexplicably vindictive; now I find her completely insane. Why would she risk everything to stop me being honored? Why is it so important to her to humiliate and punish me?
I can only think that she has fallen into the jealous mood of her childhood, when she lived in a constant state of anxiety as to who was favored by her father. First she queened it over her half sister, Mary Tudor, who was forced to wait on her when she was a little child, and then Elizabeth was mortified when the tables were turned and Mary was favored. She saw her despised half sister take the throne, acclaimed by everyone in the first months of her reign. Elizabeth has always been rivalrous of other women: I imagine she hated her stepmothers, then her half sister, then poor Amy Dudley, and now me. She must hate me with a really terrible vengeance if she will sacrifice Robert Dudley in marriage to another woman to keep me from a title. I begin to think that she is as mad as her father.
But this only makes me fear her more, and I wish I could talk to Ned about my rising concerns. This is no longer a matter of politics, of strategy. This is not a queen avoiding an heir that she fears would draw the attention of the court away from the throne; this is a woman going to the ends of the earth to spite a rival. She is ready to lose the love of her life and nominate the enemy of her country as her heir, in order to keep me from a chance at the throne, and to prevent me living happily with Ned and our children. How she must hate me to go to these lengths! How she must hate the idea of a happy marriage with beloved children, if she would ruin herself to spoil my life. And how far might she go, to take vengeance on me for being younger, prettier, happier, and a better heir than she was?
I don’t forget seeing her malice to her half sister, Mary. She watched her die, and tormented her as she died, flirting with her husband and refusing her any comfort. I don’t forget that Amy Dudley died alone at home and that her murderer was never named, but that Elizabeth knew of her death before it was announced. Elizabeth’s rivalry is something a woman should fear. I think of my cousin Mary Queen of Scots and pray that she never falls into Elizabeth’s power as I have done. I think of Margaret Douglas and think it is a miracle that she has been freed. I begin to wonder if Elizabeth is as fatal to her kin as her deadly father was to his.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
MIDSUMMER 1563
The weather becomes terribly hot and the sun beats on the stone walls of the Tower till they are too bright to see and hot to the touch. The moat is a sluggish stinking ditch filled with dung and offal, and the tides do not cleanse it but stir up the filth, and then retreat, leaving rotting seaweed and dead fish. In the evening I can smell the stink of decay from the river, and the terrible sickly smell of the city.