is the noble way. I don’t do it myself; but I know enough to admire it.
Not that there is anything wrong with Tutbury village. The road that winds through it is broad enough and well-enough made. There is a moderately good ale house and an inn that once was clearly a church poorhouse in the old days before someone put in their bid and seized it – though looking at it and the fields around it, I doubt there was a great profit. There are good farms and fertile fields and a river that runs deep and fast. It is low-lying land, not the countryside I love: the steep hills and low valleys of the Derbyshire Peaks. It is all rather flat and dull and Tutbury Castle sits atop its own little mound like a cherry on a pat of syllabub. The road to the castle winds up this little hill like a path up a midden and at the top is a handsome gateway built of good stone and an imposing tower which makes you hope for better; but you are soon disappointed. Inside the curtain wall to the left is a small stone house which all but leans against the damp wall, with a great hall below and privy rooms above, a kitchen and bakehouse on the side. These, if you please, are to be the apartments of the Queen of Scots, who was born in the Castle of Linlithgow and raised in the Chateau of Fontainebleau and may well be a little surprised to find herself housed in a great hall which has next to no daylight in winter and is haunted by the lingering stink of the neighbouring midden.
On the opposite side of the courtyard are the lodgings for the keeper of the castle, where I and my lord are supposed to huddle in a part-stone, part-brick building with a great hall below and lodgings above and – thank God – at least a decent fireplace big enough for a tree at a time. And that is it. None of it in good repair, the stone outer wall on the brink of tumbling into the ditch, the slates loose on every roof, crows’ nests in every chimney. If the queen takes herself up to the top of the tower at the side of her lodgings she can look out over a country as flat as a slab of cheese. There are some thick woods and good hunting to the south but the north is plain and dull. In short, if it were a handsome place I would have pressed my lord to rebuild it and make a good house for us. But he has taken little interest in it and I have none.
Well, I am taking an interest now! Up the hill we toil with my good horses slipping and scrabbling in the slush and the wagoners shouting, ‘Go on! Go on!’ to get them to strain against the traces and haul the carts up the hill. The castle doors are open and we stumble into the courtyard and find the entire household, mouths agape, in dirty clothes, the spit boys without shoes, the stable lads without caps, the whole crew of them looking more like they had just been freed from a Turk’s galley than the staff of a nobleman’s house, waiting to serve a queen.
I jump down from my horse before anyone has the wit to come and help me. ‘Right, you scurvy knaves,’ I say irritably. ‘We have to get this place in order by the end of January. And we are going to start now.’
1569, January, on the journey from Bolton Castle to Tutbury Castle: George
She is a plague and a headache and a woman of whims and fancies, she is a nightmare and a trouble-maker and a great, great queen. I cannot deny that. In every inch of her, in every day, even at her most troublesome, even at her utterly mischievous, she is a great, great queen. I have never met a woman like her before. I have never even seen a queen such as her before. She is an extraordinary creature: moody, mercurial, a thing of air and passion, the first mortal that I have ever met that I can say is indeed truly divine. All kings and queens stand closer to God than ordinary men and women; but this is the first one in my experience who proves it. She is truly touched by God. She is like an angel.
I cannot like her. She is frivolous and whimsical and contrary. One day she begs me to let her gallop over the fields to escape the drudgery of plodding along the muddy road (I have to refuse); then the next she is too ill and too weary to move. She cannot face the cold, she cannot tolerate the icy wind. Her health is fragile, she has a persistent pain in her side. I believe she is frail as any weak woman. But if so, how did she find the courage and the strength to come down the walls of Bolton Castle on a rope? Or ride for three days from a bitter defeat at Langside, Scotland, to Whitehaven, England, three days of dining on nothing but oatmeal, with her hair cropped short as a boy’s for disguise? Riding hard and sleeping rough, with rough soldiers as her companions? What powers can she draw on, that we mere mortals cannot have? It has to be God Himself who gives her this tremendous power and her female nature that undermines her strength with natural delicacy.
I must say, she does not inspire me either to love, or to deep loyalty. I would never trust her with my oath – as I have trusted my own queen. This one is quicksilver: she is all fire and light. A queen who wants to hold her lands needs to be more of the earth. A queen who hopes to survive the hatred that all men naturally have for women who contradict God’s law and set themselves up as leaders has to be a queen like a rock, a thing of the earth. My own queen is rooted in her power. She is a Tudor with all their mortal appetites and earthly greed. My queen Elizabeth is a most solid being, as earthy as a man. But this is a queen who is all air and angels. She is a queen of fire and smoke.
On this journey (which feels as if it will last forever) she is greeted all along the road by people turning out to wave to her, to call their blessings down on her; and it makes a hard journey ten times longer. It amazes me that in midwinter, they would leave their firesides to wait all day at the crossroads of the cold lanes for her small train to come by. Surely they must have heard the scandals about her? Every drinker in every ale house in the kingdom has smacked his lips over the rumours which have somehow spilled out from the inquiries into her character; and yet I have to send orders ahead of us, wherever we go, that they are not to ring the church bells for this queen’s entry into their village, they are not to bring their babies for her blessing, they are not to bring their sick for her to touch against the King’s Evil, they are not to cut green branches and throw them down in the road before her as if she were riding in triumph: as blasphemous as if she were Jesus going into Jerusalem.
But nothing I say prevents them. These Northern superstitious feckless people are besotted with this woman, who is so far removed from them that they might as well love the moon. They honour her as if she were more than a queen, more than an ordinary woman whose reputation is already shadowed by gossip. They honour her as if they knew better than me – as if they knew a higher truth. As if they know her to be, indeed, the angel that she resembles.
It is a matter of faith, not wisdom. These are a stubborn people who don’t agree with the changes that our queen – Elizabeth – has introduced into their churches. I know that they keep the old faith as best they can, and they want a priest in the pulpit and the Mass said in the old ways. Half of them still probably hear the Mass behind closed doors on a Sunday and none the wiser. They would rather have their faith and their God and their sense of Our Lady watching over all of them than obey the new ever-changing laws of the land. The whole of the North has always been determinedly unimpressed by the reform of religion, and now that this other queen is riding down their lanes, they are showing their true colours: their loyalty to her, their constancy to their faith. They are hers, heart and soul, and I do not know if Cecil had considered this when he ordered me to move her to Tutbury. I don’t know if he understands how little sway Queen Elizabeth, and her faith, has in these northern counties. Perhaps he should have taken her further south? But perhaps everywhere she goes she will be passionately loved? There are Papists, God knows, everywhere in England, perhaps half the country believes that this is our true queen, and the other half will love her when they see her.
This queen, as equally famous for her piety as she is notorious for her lust, wears a rosary at her belt and a crucifix at her throat where I sometimes see her blush rise; she flushes pink like a girl. The Pope himself prays for her by name as she rides through mortal peril. At the worst moments, when we are half-mobbed by a crowd of people quietly whispering blessings on
