Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (37 page)

“I follow you on the jealousy and insecurity part,” I said. “But other than that, Othello seems pretty different from Darnley. Othello is effective and respected, outside of the fatal sexual jealousy he has regarding his wife, Desdemona.”

“Think about it, Dolly. For one thing, Othello was a Moor, and as such, an outsider in Venetian society in spite of his rank. My second husband was likewise an outsider at the Scottish court. As an effete Englishman among a court of rough-and-ready Scotsmen, he stuck out like a sore thumb, and his being married to me was not enough to mitigate that.”

“Point taken,” I said.

“And don’t forget, Dolly, that through his mother,” Mary said, taking Margaret by the hand, “Darnley was pretty much as royal as I was, at least, when it came to the English throne. Arguably, absent of me he was next in line to it.”

“He was a contender to the Scottish throne as well, through his father,” Margaret pointed out.

“Yes, one does tend to forget Darnley’s rightful place as Tudor and Scottish heir and the relative strength of that against the other, largely female or questionably legitimate candidates. Perhaps he was so very much eclipsed because of the glare of your own incendiary persona,” I said, raising my hat to Mary.

“And then, of course, there was Darnley’s suggestibility,” Mary pointed out. “He was as easily manipulated by the canny Scots of my court into killing Rizzio as Othello was manipulated by Iago into smothering the innocent Desdemona in her bed.”

“I’d not considered the suggestibility angle,” I admitted.

“Suggestibility came into play in my other Darnley work as well,” Mary pointed out.

“I can’t quite make a guess as to which one it is,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m developing a bit of Shakespeare fatigue.”

Elizabeth picked up two silver trays that were at hand and clapped them together, lustily crying out, “Hint!”

Chapter Ninety-Nine

Imogen and Imagining

“Cymbals,” I said aloud. “Of course—
Cymbeline
! Suggestibility added to the jealousy and insecurity mentioned earlier—that about sums it up.”

In
Othello
, the title character’s sexual jealousy, whipped up by the evil Iago on evidence as slender as a stolen hankie, causes him to murder his wife, Desdemona. When Othello learns that Desdemona is innocent of any such behavior, he kills himself in remorse.

The hero of
Cymbeline
comes off much more lightly for his sexual jealousy. Convinced this time by a pilfered bracelet, the jealous husband puts a hit out on his wife, Imogen. Fortunately for all, the hit man correctly deems Imogen innocent and fails to carry out the hit. Eventually all comes right, and everyone, even the evil Iachimo, lives happily ever after in the kingdom of Cymbeline, Imogen’s father.

“So, in
Cymbeline
, you explore what might have happened had circumstances treated Darnley a little differently,” I said to Mary.

“Yes,” Mary admitted. “I had the story of
Cymbeline
from Hollinshead, and I compared it to the story from Cynthio that inspired my
Othello
. Darnley didn’t have the bottle to have committed the Rizzio murder himself; he may have gone to his grave an innocent man had he not found himself at the Scottish court, surrounded by the kind of men who knew how to exploit a weaker character.”

At the words “gone to his grave,” I was reminded that the jury was still very much out on whether Mary was complicit in the eventual murder of her husband, Darnley. However, Elizabeth was chomping at the bit to take over, now that Mary had covered all her plays. The story of Darnley’s murder—one of the great unsolved crimes of all time—like the Bothwell kidnapping would be one more story for another night.

“Well, Mary, now that we’ve covered the round dozen of your literary output, perhaps you will answer me a question. However did your plays make it from your castle prisons into the hands of William Shakespeare?”

Elizabeth stepped next to Mary, Queen of Scots, and the two joined hands.

“I guess you could say it was a cousinly secret,” Mary said; Elizabeth just smiled.

Mary, Queen of Scots, kept plenty of secrets from her cousin Elizabeth in life—to wit, two attempts, the Ridolfi and Babington Plots, to seize her cousin’s throne and possibly end her life.

Elizabeth, who liked to keep everybody guessing, likewise was not forthcoming with her Scottish cousin; Mary’s imprisonment had to have entailed twenty years or so of just wondering what Elizabeth was thinking.

It was a treat, really, to see these two legendary protagonists with a secret actually
shared
between them. At least I assumed there was a shared secret; they certainly had the look of coconspirators if ever I saw it.

“Am I correct in guessing, Mary, that your works found their way into Elizabeth’s hands after your death?”

“No, Dolly. They found their way to Elizabeth’s hands
before
my death.”

“How odd that you thought to trust your plays to the woman who was about to have you executed,” I said. “Who delivered them to Elizabeth for you? Was their route as roundabout as that of the plays of Mary Tudor or of the Grey sisters?”

“No, Dolly, their route was not circuitous at all. In fact, it was quite direct; quite literally, hand to hand.”

And with that, I learned that famous meeting places such as Yalta, Appomattox, Worms, and Runnymede didn’t have much at all on the once-upon-a-time castle of Fotheringay.

Chapter One Hundred

A Gem of a Stratagem

“You handed your plays to Elizabeth yourself?” I asked the Scottish queen.

“Yes,” Mary affirmed.

“But history tells us that you and Elizabeth never met; that nonmeeting is looked upon as one of the great ironies of the Tudor age, considering the drama that took place between the two of you.”

“Well, Dolly, that is one more thing you can set history straight on,” Elizabeth said. “I may be the kind of girl who can have my own cousin executed—”

“Runs in the family, after all,” Jane pointed out.

“As I was saying,” Elizabeth said, “I may be the kind of girl who can have her own cousin executed, but I am
not
the kind or girl who would do so without meeting with said cousin face-to-face for an airing of our mutual grievances.”

“So did you bring Mary to see you, Elizabeth, or did you go to see Mary?”

“After the Babington Plot blew open, I was pressed into a corner about doing something about Mary, who had plotted twice at that point to take my throne and my life. She was too hot a commodity to be moved, even covertly. So I arranged to go to Fotheringay in the latter part of 1586 to meet with her in secret and discuss affairs.”

“How did you manage it secretly?” I asked Elizabeth. “It can’t have been easy for you to have left court without its being noticed.”

“My Scottish cousin was brought to Fotheringay for the trial that established her guilt in the Babington Plot late in 1586,” Elizabeth began. “I myself was at Windsor until Parliament met that year to discuss the whole Queen of Scots situation. I retreated to Richmond once Parliament was in session.”

“Well, avoidance was your forte, after all.”

“Not for avoidant purposes on this occasion, Dolly. Cecil and I felt it would be easier to make arrangements from Richmond.”

“Arrangements?” I asked.

“Yes. Cecil was, at that point, increasingly insistent on Mary’s being executed, and I knew the Parliament that was then meeting would likewise soon be hot on my heels with the same agenda. I told Cecil that I could not consider such a thing as an execution without seeing Mary personally first. He then shocked me by suggesting that he arrange for a private and secret meeting between just the two of us, Mary and me.”

“Why as private as that?” I asked.

“Cecil believed, as did I, that there are some things best left to women to sort out between themselves,” Elizabeth said.

“Smart man,” I said. “Tell me, how did Cecil sneak you out of Richmond and over to Fotheringay?”

“On the day in question, I let on that I had a sick headache, a sore throat, and a touch of laryngitis. I took to my bed, demanding a day or two of being left strictly alone, with meals being delivered to my chamber. Given my, as you call them, Dolly, avoidant tendencies and the Parliamentary goings on of the moment, no one questioned it. Once I was behind closed doors, Cecil had a
trusted female agent smuggled in from the country to take my place in the bedchamber.”

“One of the members of Team Owen and Oddingsells?” I inquired.

“Spot on, Dolly. Mrs. Oddingsells was well up for the proceedings to follow. Fortunately, she was about my age and size, and Cecil had her dye her hair to a similar color to mine.”

“How did Cecil manage to introduce her into your bedchamber?”

“Cecil arranged for
his
staff, rather than mine, to be in charge of providing my food for the duration of my indisposition. He said it was heightened security, necessary to head off any chance of my being poisoned at such a critical political juncture. Oddingsells brought the first meal, and we traded places and outfits without anyone being the wiser. My capable replacement from the country managed to be in the privy, or under the covers, whenever servants appeared with my later meals or any of my ladies popped in to check on me. No one was the wiser that I was gone for a little while. Or, if they were, they were smart enough not to mention it.”

“And how were you introduced into Fotheringay?” I asked.

“Cecil contacted Sir Amyas Paulet, who had charge of Mary at that time. Amyas was very security conscious, and Cecil knew it. Cecil told the man that he, too, was concerned about the air-tightness of arrangements for the Scottish queen at Fotheringay. Amyas had no reason to question Cecil’s demand to make a personal and confidential survey of Fotheringay and of Amyas’s procedures to ensure that all was in order. Cecil told Amyas that he
was bringing with him one person only for the inspection; an expert, he said, in prison security.”

“Walsingham?” I conjectured.

“No, Dolly; it was me. I was dressed as a man, of course; hat pulled down over my brow and ruff pretty much up to my eyeballs. I said nothing to Amyas during the proceedings—only nodded at him—and he didn’t recognize me. Or if he did, he had the sense not to let on.”

“How did you get access to your cousin, once you were there?”

“Cecil dispatched me to make an investigation of the physical plant while he discussed policy and procedure with Amyas. Cecil told Amyas that I was to have run of the house and that the servants were to do my bidding, no questions asked. He made clear that he wanted me to have private and unrestricted access to Mary’s chamber while she was in it. All her servants were to vacate the room, though, lest any of them were in cahoots with Mary somehow, Cecil said. They were to wait just outside her room, where she could easily call out to them if needed. No one thought to question Cecil, or through my association with him, me. I was alone with Mary in her chamber before I knew it.”

Chapter One Hundred-One

Amnesty, Your Majesty

“What was your first thought, Mary, when Elizabeth revealed her identity to you?”

“Quite frankly,” Mary said, “my first emotion was one of annoyance at being caught unawares. It was late in the day, and I had retired for the evening. I hadn’t my wig or any properly supportive foundation garments on, or any accessories in place. For someone with my lifelong reputation for elegance, even in difficult circumstances, this was upsetting to the equilibrium. I felt as though Elizabeth had wanted to deliberately put me at a disadvantage, and I told her so.”

“She calmed down,” Elizabeth said, “when I pointed out to her that I, dressed as a yeoman of the guard, was not at my elegant best either.”

“At that point, inexplicably, we both started laughing uncontrollably,” the Scottish queen said, smiling at the memory.

“Nothing inexplicable about that,” I said. “Put girl cousins alone together and add an inside joke, and there can be only one outcome, at least initially,” I said. “Tell me what happened when the laughing jag subsided.”

“We talked awhile about family resemblances,” recalled Mary, Queen of Scots. “I’d never met any of my Tudor relations, so it was interesting to know who I looked like. Elizabeth told me that I took after her aunt, Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s younger sister.”

“You do, at that! I’d not noticed it before,” I said, remembering my meeting with that lady the last time I was here.

“And Mary was surprised at how ample my curves were,” Elizabeth said proudly, thrusting out what I would estimate was a 34C bustline. “She’d been led to believe that I was skinny, like an old maid.”

“Then we talked about the difficulties inherent in being a queen,” Mary said. “I could talk about it only from past experience at that point, but still, I could validate a lot of what Elizabeth had to deal with. She and I were the only two queen regnants in our part of the world, so the opportunity to vent to each other was quite therapeutic.”

“And I could validate a lot of what my Scottish cousin was experiencing at Fotheringay, based on my own quasi-imprisonment during my sister’s reign,” Elizabeth added.

“We talked about my brother-in-law, the Duke of Anjou, whom I had not seen since I left France. Hearing Elizabeth talk about his courtship escapades was like being back with my adopted French family for a while,” Mary added.

“We discussed John Knox’s
Monstrous Regiments
and agreed that his stance against women queens was quite out of order,” Elizabeth said, swatting at an imaginary Knox with her plume.

“Nothing like a common enemy to bring people together,” I said.

“That reminds me, we did chew the fat about Bess of Hardwick and that poor henpecked husband of hers. We had quite an enjoyable little gossip,” Elizabeth said.

“The fact that each of you was plotting to kill the other didn’t come up at all?” I asked.

“It did,” Elizabeth said, “but what was there to say? Self-preservation motivated us both. When we were able to accept that basic premise and ignore the religious and political dust
storms that surrounded it, we were in a position to let go of a lot of our resentments and come to an understanding.”