A Court Affair (24 page)

“My father and brother are dead, and
you
bring me walnuts!” he bellowed at me.
“Walnuts!”
he spat contemptuously.

I backed away from him, fighting down the urge to raise my hands to shield my face again. I didn’t know whether he was going to strike me, but I didn’t want to give him any ideas either, and I was afraid that if I acted like I feared the blows, that would only be inviting them.

Timorously, I told him that I had written a letter to Queen Mary, begging for an audience, so that I might go on my knees before her and plead for his life.

“God’s blood, Amy!”
Robert roared, slamming his fist into the wall, then turning round and walking away from me, running his fingers through his thick hair, tugging it, even as blood dripped from his knuckles. He swung round suddenly and dealt his writing desk a savage kick that left it lying on its side, shy one gilded leg. “
Why
can you not leave well enough alone? Go back to the country, and leave such things to my mother; you will only say the wrong thing, and that will indeed be the death of me! My mother knows how to do things
right
! Your country-bumpkin ignorance will be the death of me yet!”

“As you wish!” I blurted through a great, bursting bubble of sobbing, and, turning my back, though he already knew I was crying, I ran out. I wept all the way back to my cousins’ town house in Camberwell. I was crying so hard that I quite overpaid the coachman, and he doffed his bedraggled plumed cap and smiled and bowed my sobbing form all the way up the steps to the front door as though I were the Queen of England myself.

With tear-blinded eyes, I helped Pirto pack my things, throwing them into the trunks any which way, not caring if my gowns wrinkled or if anything broke, and set out for Stanfield Hall at first light the next morning. I was out in the courtyard whilst the sky was still dark, pacing back and forth and stamping my feet with impatience, waiting for the sun to rise so we could be off. I knew I was running away, and it would look as though I were abandoning my husband, but I didn’t care; he didn’t want me there, and I didn’t want to stay where I wasn’t wanted.

I wanted
so much
to help my husband, to save him if I could, and he didn’t even think I was good enough to go on my knees before the Queen and plead for his life. He thought I would commit some terrible blunder that would seal his doom! How could he think I would ever do
anything
to hurt him? The Queen was a woman, and a woman in love, if the rumours spoke truth, infatuated with a portrait of a Spanish prince she longed to marry.
Surely
if I knelt before her and spoke from my heart, she would understand. But, even though he was locked away in prison, I had not the courage to defy my husband’s wishes, so I crept away, like a whipped and whimpering dog with its tail tucked between its legs, and left my husband’s fate in the hands of my most capable mother-in-law.

Stanfield Hall, near Wymondham, in Norfolk
and
Syderstone Manor in Norfolk
November 1554–November 1558

T
hough he lost his father and Guildford to the headsman’s axe and would lose his youngest surviving brother, Henry, right before his eyes to a cannonball at the Siege of St Quentin in Calais, and John to gaol fever, and his mother likewise to a fever, but the last smiling on her deathbed, happy in the knowledge that she had succeeded in securing a pardon for her surviving sons, Robert would save himself by swallowing his pride, changing his colours like one of those peculiar lizards that can change the hue of their skin to suit their surroundings, and crawling on his knees and grovelling before Queen Mary.

With tears in his eyes, his hand upon his heart, and a gold crucifix studded with garnets and diamonds about his throat, he
swore
that he had
always
been true to
her
and no other sovereign, but he had been raised and had always endeavoured to be a loyal and obedient son to his father—as all children are taught from the cradle to be—and thus he had followed his father’s commands, though in his heart he raged and rebelled against them, knowing that Mary was the true and lawful Queen of England.

“When I was sent to capture Your Majesty, my failure to do so was intentional, not some accident of fate or blunder,” he lied shamelessly.

And the Queen, as women were ever wont to do with Robert, let herself believe him. But it was
all
a lie. Behind her back, Robert mocked Mary as “a pathetic old maid” and “the greatest fool who ever wore petticoats”; he laughed at her dreams of love, her desire to be a wife and mother; just because she was naïve and no longer young or pretty, he thought she was a fool for hoping, wanting, and dreaming. “That is one woman who should thank her lucky star that she was born royal; otherwise, no man would look twice at her, much less wed and bed her!” he avowed. I thought him
very
cruel.

And then began the grand deception. Just like a couple of chameleons—that’s the name of the lizard I mean—we must change our colours to save our skin. Robert sent for the jeweller and ordered a number of large jewelled crucifixes of both silver and gold, the more ornate and elaborate the better, and hung them about my neck and his own. He ordered rosaries for us of pearls and precious polished jewel beads and had our feet shod and our hands gloved in the finest and most beautifully embellished Spanish leather. He fastened beneath my skirts a cone-shaped Spanish farthingale and about my waist a long chain from which a little gilt and bejewelled book with beautifully painted and gilded pages hung. The words were in Latin, so like gibberish to me, they might have been a witch’s curse or a recipe for laundry soap for all I knew, but Robert told me to read it anyway and
always
make a point of saying what
great
comfort it brought me. He also instructed that if any great or influential personages were about, I should let myself be seen embroidering an altar cloth. He strode about in fine, gold-fringed, jewelled, and embroidered blood red Spanish array, with rubies sparkling on his spurs, like blood red centres of a pair of golden suns, and nodded in approval as Mr Edney decked me out in a gown of sunny yellow satin embroidered and fringed in vivid red, so much that I looked as though I were dripping blood. And as he ordered ornaments for our chapel and embroidered vestments for the priest, the embroidered hanging Mary had sent us as a wedding gift was frantically sought and dug out of a box in the attic at Stanfield Hall and dusted off and hung in a place of honour for all to see. But it was all a grand, elaborate fiction, calculated to win favour with the sovereign, because Mary had won, and we must stay on the winning side.

Talk of having me presented at court was revived, and a sparkling purple tinsel gown trimmed with diamonds and beautiful silver point lace was ordered to be “made with all haste” by Mr Edney. But the thought of all the eyes of the court watching me, so critical and condescending, mocking me and laughing at me behind their hands and fans as I stood alone and curtsied before the Queen, made me
so
sick with terror that I begged to be excused. I was sorely afraid that I would commit some grievous blunder, that I would trip over my own feet or tangle them in my skirts and fall flat on my bum. I had nightmares aplenty in which I did just that or, worse, where I started to speak, but only gibberish or crude and rude vulgarity or vomit came spewing out of my mouth, or a great belch, or else I broke wind as loud as cannon fire, the humiliating sound echoing throughout the stillness of the vast presence chamber before the pointed fingers and convulsive laughter began, or that I was so nervous that I lost control of my bladder and left a yellow puddle right there at the foot of the Queen’s throne. I would start awake with my face wet with tears and my whole body quaking, fearing that the dreams might be a portent, a sign of things to come.

In the end, Robert relented and decided it was all for the best that I stay where I was. He rode back to court alone, leaving me and my new purple gown in the country. “Wear it for the chickens, Amy,” Robert said scathingly before he banged the lid of the chest shut upon it, with the same finality as closing a coffin. “I am sure that they and the cows and the sheep and pigs will be quite impressed, and when you walk past, you will dazzle the eyes of every peasant, and they will fall to their knees and praise God, thinking that a princess walks amongst them.”

I knew that he was very disappointed in me. Robert and I, we always seemed to let each other down now in one way or another. I loved him
so much,
and I wanted to please him dearly, but at the same time I knew I would never make a courtier’s wife, and I would rather disappoint my husband in the quietness of the country than before the eyes of the entire court. I would rather my disgrace be a private one.

To further prove his loyalty, Robert faithfully served Queen Mary’s much-detested Spanish bridegroom. And when Prince Philip made war against the French in Calais, my husband acted as personal messenger, conveying the Queen’s love letters to her consort, and his cold and brief replies back to her. Ever one to see an opportunity and seize it, when it was a spoken message instead of written words that he carried back to Her Majesty, with deft skill Robert embroidered it, weaving in words of love that made the Queen’s haggard, careworn face light up. She blossomed like a rose after every such message Robert brought her. One time, Her Majesty was
so
grateful that she took Robert’s arm and led him into her private chapel to hear Mass kneeling beside her and afterwards gave him a gift of £100 for “bringing my languishing, lovelorn heart back to life again, pulsing with the life’s blood of hope and true love”.

Robert was still mocking, still laughing, over her words when he lost every penny of that money in a card game and, to be in ready funds again and satisfy his debts, had to borrow at an absurd rate of interest from a London moneylender. He was in so thick with them, I later learned, to satisfy a £5 debt to his late mother’s apothecary he was left indebted to a Mr Borrowe, a most aptly named moneylender, for £20 in interest on top of the original sum. I never did understand my husband’s financial dealings; to me they were all a tangled, knotted disarray I never could sort out. When he arranged to take over a manor called Hales Owen that had originally gone to his brother Ambrose by their late mother’s will, my heart leapt and gladdened. I thought it meant a home for us, but neither Robert nor I ever did set foot there, and somehow Robert ended up in debt to Ambrose for £800 and to his Uncle Andrew for £300, and responsible for all his late mother’s debts, a generous stipend of £50 per annum to his sister Catherine, and Hales Owen was mortgaged to the hilt to his own treasurer, Mr Forster, as recompense for various loans, only to be leased right back to Robert, who then sold it not once but
twice,
first to a Mr Tuckey and then to a Mr Lyttleton for £2,000 from the first and £3,000 from the latter. My mind still cannot grasp it, nor do I know where the money went, but I feel as certain as certain can be that there was some chicanery at the heart of it.

Queen Mary next sent Robert back to Calais on her fastest ship with a basket full of Prince Philip’s favourite meat pies, fresh and hot from the palace oven. Robert swore he would guard them with his life, painting a picture with words of himself bravely defending the basket of pies, keeping the hungry sailors and starving citizens of Calais who were drawn by their enticing aroma at bay with the point of his sword. Nothing, with a hand over his heart he assured the poor, lovesick Queen, would give him greater pleasure than to kneel at Prince Philip’s feet and present these pies to him with his wife’s loving words and, perchance, have the honour of watching him savour each bite so that he might, upon his return, kneel before “The Queen of My Heart” and tell her of the pleasure her gift had given her beloved, and the pleasure he himself had derived from being the messenger entrusted with this “gift to nourish love”. What nonsense and cruel, self-serving lies it all was! It hurt my heart then, and still does now, to contemplate my husband’s cruelty. And as far as the pies were concerned, Robert did no such thing. I think he ate them himself; he later pronounced them “fit for a prince”, and how else would he have known that if he had not tasted them?

The whole time Robert was supposedly playing “Love’s Messenger” and “Cupid’s Emissary”, as he poetically described himself, he simply cut through the sentimental treacle and told Prince Philip only what he needed to know and saved the sugary word confections he concocted for Queen Mary, reassuring her that though her husband’s letters were brief and blunt, such was the way of most Spanish men in their correspondence, but the words that Philip spoke about his wife were “infinitely—and dare I say intimately?—more tender”, and left the Queen swooning back against the velvet cushions of her chair, clasping her heart, believing that Philip kept her miniature beside his bed so it would be the last thing his eyes saw every night and the first they opened to each morning.

And when he learned that Prince Philip was an ardent admirer of Venetian Ice Glass, nothing would do but for Robert to give him our own vast set, my favourite, much-treasured wedding gift that had never even been used, never had the chance to grace our own table, over which I presided proudly as Robert’s wife. Instead, I got to watch—“to supervise”, Robert said—the servants as they packed it all with great care into crates filled with straw, and took it in carts, driven no faster than a walk, all the way to London, where they carried it gently, as if each crate were a cradle containing a royal prince, aboard a ship that would then convey it to Philip’s palace in Spain.

Thus Robert found favour with both sovereigns, and his star was on the rise again. The attainder against the Dudleys was reversed, and all property, including Hemsby-by-the-Sea, was returned. But we would never go there again; though in those days I still continued to hope, in truth he never had any intention of returning to the place where we had spent the happiest days of our marriage. I would later learn he sold it and sent the money to the Princess Elizabeth, “so she doesn’t forget who her
real
friends are”. At those words I almost laughed in his face; Robert was a real friend to no one but himself, and sometimes I thought he would even betray himself for thirty pieces of silver. One day, I was certain, he would aim too high, fly too close to the sun, and see all his dreams of grandeur burned to a cinder; he would crash and burn from everything to nothing.