The Queen's Gamble (40 page)

He nodded. She saw how much it rankled him. One stroke of the King’s pen had knocked him down from grandee to poor relation dependent on his father-in-law. He laid his hand on her swollen belly. “Isabel, I’m sorry.”

But she was not. She was happy. She was loath to show him
how
happy. Now that it was decided, now that they had been cut off from their life in Peru, she realized it was exactly what she had been hoping for. It felt as if she had been cut free. Free to stay where she wanted. In England. Home.

Her mother was as good as her word. That very evening, after supper, a messenger arrived from the Queen summoning Carlos and Isabel to Whitehall. Isabel was bubbling with hope as they dressed for the audience, and she could tell that Carlos was hopeful, too. Told by her friend Lady Thornleigh of their plight, the Queen seemed ready to reward them for saving her life. There was every reason to expect she would be generous.

It was dusk, yet still sweltering when their hired boat rowed them past the city and around the bend in the river toward the palace. Church bells were pealing from Lambeth on the southern shore, and as their boat approached the palace wharf, it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. The wherries and tilt boats and barges were so thick, it was hard for their man to row through the traffic, and the wharf itself was a whirl of courtiers, ladies, footmen, musicians. Men called for boats and women laughed and chattered as they milled about. Isabel saw a pet monkey chittering atop a lady’s shoulder. Torches bobbed in the hands of a dozen servants in the Queen’s livery who were hurrying down her private stairs. “What is it?” Isabel asked the boatman as they came alongside the jetty and he shipped his oars. “A banquet? A masque?”

“It’s late for supping, my lady. From the sound of the Lambeth bells, I’d say Her Majesty is going out. They ring whenever she goes on the river.”

“You’re right,” Carlos said. “Look.”

Isabel saw what he was pointing to. Past the throng of people a gorgeously decked barge waited at the far edge of the wharf. Torchlight gleamed over its gilt prow, its garlands of silk roses, its windows paned with glass, its gold embroidered cushions, and its canopy of green silk that rippled in the faint river breeze. Carlos handed Isabel out of their boat and they made their way through the throng and up the stairs. Torches flared all along the gravel walk, and more servants with more torches and lanterns scurried toward the wharf. Isabel and Carlos had not even reached the palace doors when a small group of young ladies and gallants burst forth, laughing. The finery on men and women alike was a dazzle of colors—popinjay blue, scarlet, sea green, and gold—and in the center was Elizabeth in a blaze of gold and black, with silver slippers and silver spangles in her hair. Laughing too, she skipped like a schoolgirl.

“Aha!” she cried merrily, seeing Isabel and Carlos. “You are tardy, good people. Another moment and you would have found me gone. ’Tis too hot for staying behind doors, and the night is young.” She stopped when she reached them. Isabel curtsied and Carlos bowed. Elizabeth’s ladies and gentlemen waited behind her, maintaining their cheerful looks. Elizabeth beckoned Isabel to rise. “Now, where is your lady mother?” she asked, looking about her party. “What, no sign of good Lady Thornleigh? I saw her not a half hour ago. Well, no matter, she has done her office.” She lifted her head with a regal smile and added, “Now, I shall do mine. You, sir,” she said to Carlos. “I am very glad to hear of your ill fortune.” Isabel thought she had misheard, but saw that she had not, for several of the courtiers looked startled, too. Elizabeth paused, enjoying the suspense she had spun. “Why? Because Spain’s loss is my gain,” she said with satisfaction. “You shall remain in England.”

Isabel relaxed and caught the smile of relief that Carlos shot her.

Elizabeth laughed. Then she said soberly, “In truth, good people, the loyalty you have shown me deserves not my jests but rather my heartfelt thanks. Which you have, indeed, in plenty.” A sly smile played on her lips. “However, madam, your mother has let me know that my thanks will not buy you a house, nor furnish your table with meat. Therefore, I hereby name you, sir, lord of a great property in my realm, including its manors, fields, forests, and mines, and all pertaining rents and revenues, which include, I understand, a profitable glass-making enterprise.”

Isabel and Carlos shared a happy glance. He said, “I thank Your Majesty most humbly.”

“Nonsense, sir, I owe you my life, and that is a thing I rather cherish.” She grinned at her friends, and they laughed. “And here is the best aspect of my gift. It has been rescued from the grip of the traitor, Sir Christopher Grenville. His lands were forfeit by his treason, and by a bill of attainder they have reverted to me. I give them now to you.” She beamed at them.

Isabel was so taken aback she could not find the wit to speak. Carlos, though, answered quickly with another expression of his gratitude.

“Nay, thank your wife’s mother, sir, for it was Lady Thornleigh who persuaded me of the justice of this arrangement.” She gave Isabel a stern look. “Mark you, madam, let this gift be an end to the discord between your families, Thornleigh and Grenville. The slate is now wiped clean. England’s war is done. Let yours be, too. I command it.”

Isabel sank into a curtsy. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Good.” She turned her attention to Carlos and went on like a diligent businesswoman, “Go, sir, and take lordship of Yeavering Hall without delay. Affairs there are in limbo, I am told, and the people in disarray. Their court-leet awaits a lord to rule on manor business, and the county assizes await a justice of the peace. Good government is needed as much at home as in my wide realm. Go posthaste, get yourself sworn in, and see to restoring harmony.”

“I will, Your Majesty. With thanks.”

The Queen looked satisfied. “Now,” she said, turning to her friends, her business done, “to the water, and a blessed cool breeze!”

They flocked around her as she made her way down the wharf.

Isabel and Carlos, left behind, looked at each other in wonder. “Rescued,” he said with a grin. “The property is vast. And rich.”

“Yes. It’s wonderful.” She was trying to sort through her emotions. The reward was great indeed, and the delight it gave Carlos made her very happy. Yet she felt uneasy. Yeavering Hall seemed tainted by Christopher Grenville.

Carlos clearly had no such misgivings. “What a night,” he said. “Let’s get a boat and join the fun.”

She smiled. “Let’s.”

The wharf was a madhouse of gaiety. People jumped into boats. People in boats called to friends ashore. The magnificent royal barge pulled out into the river, the rowers’ work made easy by the placid water. Musicians on three separate barges followed with trumpets and pipes and drums, sending music dancing across the river. Isabel and Carlos found their wherryman in the cheerful chaos, and Carlos gave him a shilling to keep rowing them wherever the Queen’s barge went. Downriver the motley flotilla coasted, past Durham House, past Baynard’s Castle, past the Old Swan Stairs. They were in merry company, for Londoners in boats all along the river cheered the Queen as she went, and on the shore trumpets blared and flags flew and people ran from their houses and crowded the jetties and called out, “God save the Queen!”

Isabel settled against the cushions, and Carlos snugged his arm around her. The cool river breeze was delicious, and stars crowded the dark sky as though they, too, had come to hail the popular young queen. “Look,” Isabel said, pointing at a constellation. “There’s Cassiopeia.” Her father had taught her about the stars on his ships, and she was proud to name them and know them.

“They’re shining on Northumberland, too,” he said, and she heard the satisfaction in his voice.

“I am glad to end the wretched feud,” she said. “But, Carlos, I’ve heard something troubling. About Grenville.” She told him the story. “Do you think it could be true?”

He shrugged. “What difference, dead or alive? He can never come back. He’d hang.” He hugged her closer to him and laughed. “You worry too much, Isabel.”

His confidence was irresistible, and her misgivings evaporated like river mist at sunrise.

She settled against him with a sigh. Music and laughter eddied around them. All of London seemed to have thrown off the pall of war and had tripped out to make merry. Isabel looked above the waving banners and flags, up at the stars. It felt as though all her hard journeying in the last months had been leading her to alight here, in this boat, on this river, under these stars. The stars that smiled on England.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Fact and fiction are intertwined in the novels of my “Thornleigh” series. The characters of the Thornleighs, Valverdes, and Grenvilles are purely my creations, but their lives weave through real historical events and around real historical personalities.

The first book in the series,
The Queen’s Lady,
features young Honor Larke, a fictional lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, and follows Honor’s stormy love affair with Richard Thornleigh as she works to rescue heretics from the Church’s fires.
The King’s Daughter
introduces their daughter Isabel, who joins the Wyatt rebellion against Queen Mary, a true event, and hires mercenary Carlos Valverde to help her rescue her father from prison.
The Queen’s Captive
brings Honor and Richard back from exile with their seafaring son Adam to help the young Princess Elizabeth, who has been imprisoned by her half sister, Queen Mary, another true event.

Fact and fiction also intermingle in the book you now hold,
The Queen’s Gamble
. All the events of the war in Scotland happened as they occur in the novel, including the countrywide rampage of John Knox’s army backed by a score of Protestant nobles, among them Lord James (the late King’s illegitimate son) and the Earls of Glencairn, Argyll, and Ruthven; the Queen Regent’s response of bringing in thousands of French troops; the alarm that this French military buildup caused Elizabeth and her council (which prompted the Spanish ambassador in London to write to his master, “It is incredible the fear these people are in of the French on the Scottish border”); and Elizabeth’s clandestine financial support of Knox’s rebels. Also true are Elizabeth’s sending Admiral Winter’s small fleet into the December gales to intercept French ships bringing more troops; Knox’s capture of Edinburgh; the Queen Regent’s successful counterattack that forced Knox’s army to retreat to Stirling; Elizabeth’s decision to send an English army into Scotland, to disastrous results at first when they attacked the French at Leith; then the English siege that resulted in the surrender of the French and total victory for the English.

The novel also refers to thousands of Spanish troops boarding ships in the Netherlands (a Spanish possession at the time), ordered by Philip of Spain to sail to Scotland to help France put down Knox’s rebels. This, too, is a fact, and if the Spanish had arrived, the fate of Scotland, and of England, could have been very different. But also true is the concurrent, shocking defeat of Philip’s army in the Mediterranean by the Turks, a devastating setback that made Philip halt his northern troops about to sail to Scotland and reroute them to fight the Turks. On such surprising hinges does history often swing.

Into these factual events I have set the actions of my fictional characters: Isabel and Carlos, Adam and Frances, Honor and Richard, and Christopher Grenville.

The plotted uprising organized by Grenville under the banner of the Catholic Earl of Northumberland is fiction, but it is based on truth, for in 1569, nine years after the novel ends, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland did raise the northern Catholics in a massive armed revolt. Leading five thousand men, they took Durham Cathedral and were preparing to march on London to depose Elizabeth. She sent a force under the Earl of Sussex to put down the uprising, which he did with great brutality, hanging over six hundred rebels. Elizabeth executed Northumberland.

What follows is a brief account of what happened, after the novel ends, to the real people who appear in the story.

Marie de Guise, unwell throughout the war with Knox’s rebels, did not survive her troops’ surrender in Scotland; she died at Leith in June, 1560. Her daughter, Mary Stuart, Queen of France at the time, refused to sign the Treaty of Edinburgh, one article of which was her relinquishing her claim to the English throne. Her refusal infuriated Elizabeth, and thus began their nineteen-year feud.

D’Oysel, commander of the French garrison at Leith, survived the English siege. My research tracked him down: A few months after the French surrender, acting as a French emissary at the English court, he asked Elizabeth to grant safe passage to Mary Stuart to travel through England on her return from France to Scotland. Elizabeth refused, a punishment to Mary for not signing the Treaty of Edinburgh, and D’Oysel took this message to Mary in France. D’Oysel has my apology for shamelessly besmirching his reputation; his sadistic streak in the novel is purely my invention.

John Knox secured the Scottish Reformation with the English-Scots victory over the French, and became his country’s most influential religious leader. He died in 1572, having changed the course of Scotland.

After less than two years as Queen of France, Mary Stuart was widowed at age eighteen when her young husband, King Francis, died just months after the French surrender in Scotland. With little status in the new court of her brother-in-law King Charles, Mary left France for her birthplace, Scotland, arriving at Leith by sea in August 1561, and took up her birthright, the Scottish throne. A devout Catholic, Mary was always at odds with Knox, and hoped to reestablish the Catholic faith with help from France or Spain, but Scotland had become a Protestant state, and no foreign power was prepared to help her reverse this.

Sir William Cecil continued as Elizabeth’s first minister for almost four more decades. A brilliant political strategist, Cecil was tireless in his efforts to maintain Elizabeth’s security and extend her power. His urging her to intervene in Scotland against the French was the first implementation of what became his policy, eloquently stated by historian Conyers Read, of “keeping Elizabeth safe by making fires in her neighbors’ houses.” It was a policy that Cecil and Elizabeth pursued next in France, helping the Protestant Huguenots in their fight against the French government, and then in the Netherlands, helping the Dutch Protestants fight their Spanish overlords, all of which undermined those foreign powers, England’s adversaries. Cecil’s service to Elizabeth spanned almost the whole of her long and peaceful reign; theirs was one of the most successful political partnerships in history. His death in 1598 was the only occasion on which she was publicly seen to weep.

Elizabeth’s victory over the French in Scotland, where
The Queen’s Gamble
ends, was a turning point in her fledgling reign, and its significance cannot be overemphasized. Despite her initial vacillation, the decision to defy the great powers of France and Spain, and to gamble on intervention, was hers alone. Her victory destroyed French domination in Scotland, and made English influence there permanently predominant. Furthermore, it elevated Elizabeth’s status at home and in the eyes of all Europe, whose leaders had to acknowledge her as a formidable ruler. She did this at the age of twenty-six, in just the second year of her reign. Nevertheless, with the return of Mary Stuart to the Scottish throne the following year, Elizabeth’s problems with Mary, her cousin and fellow queen, had just begun. Their nascent feud drives the next “Thornleigh” novel.

A note about the actors’ troupe in the book. All her life Elizabeth loved plays, but at this point in history these were mostly private entertainments enjoyed by royalty and the wealthy.
The Queen’s Gamble
takes place in 1559–1560, before the flowering of the great age of theater that we call “Elizabethan.” Shakespeare was born in 1564, and it would be almost three more decades before he and his fellow theater men built the famous public London playhouses: the Swan, the Rose, and the Globe.

Readers have sent me wonderfully astute comments and questions about the characters, real and invented, in my “Thornleigh” novels and about the history of the period. This partnership with you, the reader, makes my work a joy. If you’d like to write to me, I’d love to hear from you. Contact me at [email protected].