24
Elizabeth
T
hat stupid fool jackanapes Courtenay lost whatever wits he had—if he ever had any to start with—in the Tower, and when he was set free, rather than be grateful and keep a firm grasp on his head, he seemed determined to risk losing it at every turn.
First he courted Mary, behaving as if she were the sun, moon, and stars, and made the world move and the tides ebb and flow for him.
He chose to make his feelings known in a particularly spectacular fashion. To celebrate “the ascension of this heavenly beauteous queen to an earthly throne,” he chose to replicate the tournament that our father had arranged to celebrate Mary’s birth.
Courtenay, who had spent his formative years in the Tower and thus had been denied the proper tutelage befitting his quasi-royal station, had never in his life sat a horse, and all, if anything, he knew about horsemanship and the arts of war came from stories and books. But he decided not to let his deficiencies stop him. Thus, I suppose, for sheer determination, he must be applauded.
As Mary sat in the royal box overlooking the tiltyard, politely applauding, “The Last Sprig of the White Rose” rode out to the center of the tiltyard mounted on a white horse. Both Courtenay and his snowy mount were splendidly arrayed in golden armor and crimson silk embroidered with the golden pomegranates of Spain, and both the rider’s helm and his horse’s head were adorned with graciously swaying plumes. And as Henry VIII had done thirty-seven years before, Courtenay sported a badge identifying himself as Sir Loyal Heart.
Alas, this beautiful tableau was spoiled when Courtenay tried to bow to the Queen from the saddle and first his golden helm, followed by the gilt-armored Courtenay, crashed onto the dusty ground. Blushing furiously, he nonetheless composed himself and presented Mary with a beautifully wrought golden pomegranate that opened to reveal portraits of Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, and their beloved little princess, “Mary of the Marigold Hair,” as Courtenay called her. He then proceeded to recite a poem he had written of the same title, about which the less said the better. He then fell thrice more trying to remount, then shouting curses at his horse and calling it “a sulky brute” he raised his gilt-armored foot to kick its rump and fell with a great crash onto his own. Embarrassed and agitated, he got to his feet, seized his horse by the bridle, and stalked off the jousting field.
But he was not done humiliating himself. When he was again in the saddle and ready to compete in the first joust, he dropped his lance in terror, hugged tight his horse’s neck, squeezed his eyes shut, prayed, and held on for dear life as it galloped toward his opponent, who didn’t need his lance to unhorse Courtenay. Left to his own devices, he tumbled off himself. In the tiring tent afterward, I heard it said, when his squires stripped him down, Courtenay’s linen reeked of urine.
Undaunted, Courtenay, having heard of the sugar-candy and marzipan fairyland Henry VIII had created for his beloved daughter on her sixth birthday, wanted to give Mary a fairyland of his own devising and continued his wooing that night with an open-air banquet and pageant. I was amongst the maidens dressed in diaphanous flowing gowns of pale gold-spangled rose, green, and cream, with diamond-dusted fairy wings strapped to our backs, and our hair cascading down our backs, glistening with diamond dust, and crowned with wreaths of gilded rosemary and bejeweled silken wildflowers who danced before the Queen with gold ribbon sandals laced round our naked feet, while Mary and her most favored ladies sat in a flower-bedecked fairy bower upon a great heap of silken cushions illuminated by jewel-hued lanterns.
Courtenay himself made his entrance mounted on the same white horse he had ridden—for lack of a better word—at the tournament, somehow managing not to drop the silken cushion with an elaborate crown of gilded rosemary and jeweled flowers with which he meant to crown “The Queen of My Heart.” A pearly horn was strapped to the horse’s forehead to transform it into a unicorn and, when Courtenay grandly made his way to the Queen and bowed low before her, the horse also bowed low and charged.
Mary and her fairy-gowned ladies fled hastily, some tittering in amusement, others shrieking in alarm. But Courtenay did not know anything was amiss until he found himself floundering facedown in the Queen’s hastily vacated bower, the gaping hole in his torn breeches showing more than was proper to Her Majesty and her court, as he burst into tears and began to scream for the royal physician to come and save him from the cold embrace of Death.
Showing Courtenay the same compassion she would have shown a wounded child, Mary knelt upon the cushions beside him, modestly turning her face away from the red rose welt now blooming on the bare bottom of “The Last Sprig of the White Rose,” and held his hand as the royal physician applied ointment and a bandage. She stroked his fair hair and begged him not to cry anymore and gave him a diamond ring that had belonged to our father, which Courtenay promptly mistook for a betrothal ring and threw his arms around her neck and kissed her.
Blushing hotly as she floundered upon the heap of fat cushions in Courtenay’s eager embrace, Mary struggled free, gathered up her skirts, and fled back into the palace.
Back in his apartments, Courtenay proceeded to get gloriously drunk on elderberry wine. He ripped the gold fringed and embroidered blue velvet curtains off his bed and draped them round his body and, despite the late hour, sent his manservant running to fetch his tailor to come cut the fabric to fashion his coronation suit. He then decked his wild and rumpled golden curls with dandelions and bluebells to simulate a gold and sapphire crown and snapped the gilded leg off a chair to serve as a makeshift scepter. Then, still swathed in the blue velvet curtains, he climbed up onto a table to make a rather explicit speech about what he would do to his queenly wife on their wedding night, the sum of all the knowledge he had acquired visiting the Southwark whores several nights a week since his release from the Tower to make up for lost time and his lack of carnal knowledge. And when the diamond ring slid off his slender finger and down a rat-hole in the floorboards, Courtenay tried to dive in after it and knocked himself unconscious and spent the rest of the night snoring on the floor. He appeared the next day with a royal purple lump the size of an egg protruding through his golden curls only to discover Mary turning a distinctly cold shoulder to him when he ran up to her and tried to embrace his “wife-to-be.”
Pining for his lost love, and lost chance to wear a crown, Courtenay moped around for days weeping and wearing deepest black mourning. He even sent Mary a little black coffin with some sort of animal’s heart inside it as a symbolic gesture, albeit a gruesome one, of his grief. Then he made the foolhardy decision to accept an invitation to dine with the French Ambassador, who urged the gullible young man to shake off his gloom and take heart; if the Queen herself would not marry him, perhaps her younger, prettier sister would. He went on to captivate Courtenay by painting a pretty word picture about what a beautiful couple we would make, me with my Tudor-red tresses and milk-pale skin, a vibrant living reminder of Henry VIII, and he the very image of the tall, majestic blue-eyed golden-haired Plantagenet kings, comparing him to the great Edwards who had ruled before, when in truth his character was more like that of the weak and foolish, volatile and unstable, Edward II, who had let his kingdom go to wrack and ruin while he frolicked with Piers Gaveston. And when the Ambassador painted us with golden crowns on our heads, and Mary deposed or dead, and us sitting on a pair of golden thrones in robes bright with jewels and edged with ermine, the susceptible Courtenay realized he was in love with me and rushed straight out to pick a bouquet of buttercups and then rush breathlessly to throw himself at my feet and declare his love for me.
Every time I turned around there he was doffing his feathered hat and bowing to me, sending me childishly writ verses so gushing and sugary they nearly brought on a bilious attack of indigestion or gave me a toothache, and trinkets and gifts he either bought off street peddlers or picked up about the court and my servants later had to discreetly return to their rightful owners. Once he even knelt with his lute outside my window and serenaded me all through the night though the poor lad couldn’t carry a tune even if some obliging soul had put it in a box for him. Ever afterward he would have the court musicians play that same melody and ask me to dance, always making sly reference to his serenade. “That song has been haunting me,” he would loudly proclaim, then turn to me and ask, “Do you know why, My Lady Princess?” To which I invariably replied, “Perhaps it is because you murdered it, My Lord? It is a common belief, I am told, that ghosts often return to haunt their murderers.” Other times he would creep up close behind me and whisper in my ear that red hair denoted passion and how he longed to put a gold ring on me so he could lead me to his bed for a game of stallion and mare, asking me did I not think as the last remaining Plantagenet heir and a Tudor princess we were “fated to be mated.” “I want to ride a young filly, not an old maid,” he said, with an unsubtle jerk of his head toward Mary.
He was supposed to be Mary’s suitor, not mine, yet he now made it plain that his affections had changed course, tempering it with neither kindness nor tact, flaunting it in Mary’s face that he preferred me, the younger and prettier sister. And even though Mary no longer favored him, declaring she could not love a man who disported himself with whores and lost his dignity so utterly when in his cups, she was nonetheless upset that he had transferred his affections to me and had cast off his mourning robes and mended so quickly the heart he vowed that she had broken and, I fear, blamed me for it, though anyone with eyes could see that I did nothing to encourage him.
Every time Mary saw us together I felt my blood freeze and the back of my neck prickle as if the headsman’s ax was poised to strike. I saw the anger in her squint-narrowed eyes, and I felt the flames of her jealousy reach out and scorch me.
I knew that those who opposed the Catholic regime saw me, their beacon of hope, and young, addle-brained, easily led Edward Courtenay, and the pretty picture we made together, as the perfect figureheads for a Protestant rebellion. There were whispers all about, so loud sometimes they were practically screams, giving voice to all manner of schemes from the careful and cautious to the flamboyantly bold and brazen to dethrone Mary and put Courtenay and me, such a pretty Protestant pair, on the throne as King and Queen. But I would have none of it; I blocked my ears and walked steadfastly on, pretending that I did not hear. I wanted no part in any of their plots. If I ever became Queen it would be by God’s will, and the People’s, not through any rebellion or conspiracy. I would not have my sister’s blood shed for my sake to forever stain my conscience.
But Mary heard the whispers and they fed her fear and mistrust. She refused to grant me leave to retire from court, to go back to Hatfield or one of my other country manors. She wanted to keep me close, so she, and her spies, could keep an eye on me. She wanted to know all I did and whom I spoke with and even what letters I sent and received. She began to snub me publicly, to show that I had offended and disappointed her. Once when I stood ready to accompany her, albeit unwillingly, to Mass, she passed me by, openly shunning me, as if I did not even exist, and bade our cousin Margaret, the Countess of Lennox, a loyal and favored lady-in-waiting whose devotion, both personal and religious, was never in doubt, to walk into chapel with her and even sit beside her.
And she was still trying to turn back time. She had Parliament declare the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon legitimate, thus reaffirming and emphasizing her own legitimacy and my bastardy. She ordered a large painting of her parents, clad in black, gold, and ermine, sitting side by side on a pair of gilded thrones, holding hands, and sharing fond and loving glances, whilst their loving and devoted daughter, and lawful successor, Mary, sat at their feet, between them, also clad in black and gold, gazing up at them in rapt and worshipful adoration as if she knelt at an altar in veneration of a pair of saints, and beside her lay that eternal emblem of fidelity—a dog, her svelte little Italian greyhound.
After it was completed, there were many occasions when she would ask me to walk with her in the gallery where it hung, prominently displayed, and have us pause before it, to admire it, to comment on the beauty of the carved Spanish pomegranates and Tudor roses, the entwined initials,
H&K
, that adorned the gilded frame, or what fine, accurate likenesses the artist had wrought. “They seem to live and breathe!” Mary would sigh, clasping her hands over her heart as she stared up at the idealistic portrayal of the loving couple and the smiling, fresh and radiant-faced little girl with the wealth of marigold curls sitting at their feet. It was a child’s memory, not an adult’s reality.
It was a portent, I think, of the blindness of her madness. Mary would blunder and stagger her way through her reign like a blind woman, so shortsighted that she would never see what she needed to see until it was right in her face and far too late to avoid collision and calamity.
But my own eyes were wide open and I saw it all. Mary was already alienating her Council. She made it clear as the finest Venetian glass that she trusted the Spanish Ambassador more than any man living, except her cousin the Emperor, for whom his ambassador stood proxy. But in her idolization of Charles, Mary forgot one crucial fact—a monarch
always
acts in his, or her,
own
best interests, as does, by extension, any ambassador in their service; they are servants dedicated to serving their monarch’s and country’s best interests, even though they smile and behave with kind deference and concern to those whose favor they are courting; it is all part of the game. Renard was a velvet-tongued liar who would have happily seen Mary turned out of her kingdom in her petticoats if it would have benefited his master, but Mary believed every word he said because she wanted to believe, and sought his advice over that of her own Council when, regardless of religion, whether they were Protestant or Catholic, those men were all first and foremost Englishmen, and even though they might act out of ambition, self-interest, and greed, they would
always
serve England before they would Spain, or any other country. But Mary was too blind to see that, and whenever she desired advice or wanted to confide in someone, there sly Renard would be, with the pearly nacre of his smile agleam and the loyalty of a devoted lapdog shining in his dark serpent’s eyes, walking by or seated at her side, from which he never strayed for long. It was as if they were bound together at the hip by an invisible tether.