while she hesitates and considers, all this while, my son is in the hands of my enemies, and his tutors are Protestants. He is two years old; what they tell him of me, I cannot bear to imagine. I have to get back to him before they poison him against me.
I have men and women loyal to me, waiting for my return, I cannot make them wait forever. Bothwell, imprisoned in Denmark on a ridiculous charge of bigamy, will be planning his own escape, thinking ahead to setting me free, determined that we shall be reunited on the throne of Scotland. With or without him I have to get back and claim my throne. I have God’s hand of destiny on my life, I was born to rule Scotland. I cannot refuse the challenge to win back my throne. My mother gave her life to keep the kingdom for me, I shall honour her sacrifice and pass it on to my heir, my son, her grandson, my little boy, James, Prince James, heir to Scotland and to England, my precious son.
I cannot wait to see what Elizabeth will do. I cannot wait for her slowly to act. I don’t know if my son is safely guarded, I don’t even know if he is well-nursed. His false uncle, my half-brother, has never loved him; what if he has him killed? I left him with trustworthy guardians in Stirling Castle; but what if they are besieged? I dare not sit here quietly and wait for Elizabeth to forge a treaty with my enemies that sends me on parole to France, or orders me to hide in some convent. I have to get back to Scotland and enter the battle for my throne once more. I did not escape from Lochleven Castle to do nothing. I did not break free from one prison to wait quietly in another. I have to be free.
Nobody can know what this is like for me. Certainly not Elizabeth, who was practically raised in prison, under suspicion from the age of four. She is a woman trained to a cell. But I have been mistress of my own great rooms since I was a girl of eleven in France. My mother insisted I should have my own rooms, my own presence chamber, my own entourage; even as a child I had the ordering of my own household. Then as now, I cannot bear to be constrained; I must be free.
The ambassador bids me keep up my courage and wait for his news. But I cannot just wait. I cannot have patience. I am a young woman in the very prime of my health and beauty and fertility. They have left me to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday in prison. What do they think they are doing to me? What do they think I will endure? I cannot be confined. I must be free. I am a queen, I was born to command. They will find that I am a dangerous and untamed prisoner. They will find that I will be free.
1568, Winter, Chatsworth House: Bess
Cecil’s clerk writes to tell me that Mary Queen of Scots is not to come to us at Chatsworth, where I could entertain her as she deserves: in a great house with a beautiful park and everything done as it should be. No, she is to come to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire: one of our poorest properties and half-derelict, and I have to turn my life upside down to make this ruin fit for a queen in the middle of winter.
‘If your lord and husband could only have been prevailed on to see all the evidence against her, she could have been returned to Scotland in disgrace already,’ Cecil writes, sweet as an unripe apple, in a postscript. ‘Then we would all have been able to rest easy this Christmastide.’
There is no need for Cecil to reproach me. I warned my lord that the inquiry was a sham and a show, as close to life as are the mummers dressed in motley at Christmas. I told him that if he chose to become a player in this scene of Cecil’s devising then he must follow the playscript word by word. He was not invited there to improvise. He should have found the verdict that Cecil wanted. But he would not. If you hire an honourable man to do dirty work you will find the work honourably done. Cecil chose the wrong lord when he chose my husband to supervise the disgrace of the Scots queen. And so Cecil has no scandal, and no dishonoured queen, and I have no husband at home, and I have to clean and rebuild a derelict castle in the middle of winter.
Cecil says: ‘I am sorry that you have to house this Athalia; but I hope it will not be for long, for certainty, she will follow the destiny of her namesake.’
This obviously means something to Cecil, who has the benefit of a man’s education, but for a woman such as me, the daughter of a farmer, it is as opaque as a code. Fortunately, my darling son Henry is staying with me, on a brief holiday from his place at court. His father, my second husband, Cavendish, left me with instructions and an income to get him educated like a gentleman, and I sent him, and then his two brothers, to school at Eton.
‘Who is Athalia?’ I ask him.
‘Obscure,’ he replies.
‘So obscure that you don’t know the answer?’
He smiles lazily at me. He is a handsome boy and he knows that I dote on him.
‘So, my Mama-Countess. What is the information worth to you? We live in a world where all intelligence is for sale. You pay me well enough to report the gossip from court. I am your spy in the house of your friend Robert Dudley. Everyone has an informant and I am merely one of many of yours, I know. What will you pay me for the fruits of my education?’
‘I have paid for it once already in your tutors’ fees,’ I reply. ‘And they were dear enough. Besides, I think you don’t say because you don’t know. You are an ignoramus and my money was wasted on your education. I hoped to buy myself a scholar and all I have is an idiot.’
He laughs. He is such a handsome boy. He has all the disadvantages of a rich boy. Even though he is my own darling, I can see it clearly. He has no idea that money is hard to earn, that our world is filled with opportunity and also danger. He has no idea that his father and I went to the limits of the law and beyond to make the fortune that we would lavish on him and on his brothers and sisters. He will never work as I do, he will never worry as I do. To tell the truth, he has no idea of either work or worry. He is a well-fed boy, whereas I was raised with hunger – a hunger for everything. He takes Chatsworth for granted as his pleasant home, his due; whereas I have put my heart and soul here, and I would sell my heart and soul to keep it. He will be an earl if I can buy him an earldom, a duke, if I can afford it. He will be the founder of a new noble family: a Cavendish. He will make the Cavendish name a noble one. And he will take it all, as if it came easily, as if he had to do nothing but smile as the sun warmly smiles on him; bless him.
‘You misjudge me. I do know, actually,’ he says. ‘I am not such an idiot as you think. Athalia is in the Old Testament. She was a queen of the Hebrews and she was accused of adultery and killed by the priests, so as to free her throne so that her son Joash could become king.’
I can feel my indulgent smile freeze on my face. This is no matter for jokes. ‘They killed her?’
‘They did indeed. She was known to be unchaste, and unfit to rule. So they killed her and put her son in her place.’ He pauses. His dark eyes gleam at me. ‘There is a general view, I know vulgar, Mama, but a general view, that no woman is fit to rule. Women are by nature inferior to men and it goes against nature if they so much as try to command. Athalia was – tragically for her – only typical.’
I raise a finger to him. ‘Are you sure of that? Do you want to say any more? Would you like to expound further on female inability?’
‘No! No!’ he laughs. ‘I was expressing the vulgar view, the common error, that is all. I am no John Knox, I don’t think you are all a monstrous regiment of women, honestly, Mama, I do not. I am not likely to think that women are simple-minded. I have been brought up by a mother who is a tyrant and commander of her own lands. I am the last man in the world to think that a woman cannot command.’
I try to smile with him but inwardly I am perturbed.
