The Virgin’s Lover. Philippa Gregory

to have her to stay at their houses while you find a suitable house for her in London. She will need an escort to go to them and a lady companion as I cannot go with her, being much concerned with the business of the farm, which is still doing badly. Mrs Oddingsell would be glad to be asked, I daresay. I should be glad of your immediate reply (since I lack the sweetness and patience of your wife), and also of a full settlement of your debt to me, which is £22.

       Sarah Robsart.

      Cecil was at his heavy desk with the many locked drawers in his rooms at Whitehall Palace, in the first week of February, reading a letter in code from his agent in Rome. His first act on Elizabeth’s accession to the throne was to put as many trusted friends, kin and servants in as many key courts in Europe as he could afford, and instruct them to keep him informed of any word, of any rumour, of any ghost of a rumour, which mentioned England and her new, fragile monarch.

      He was glad he had got Master Thomas Dempsey into the Papal court at Rome. Master Thomas was better known to his colleagues in Rome as Brother Thomas, a priest of the Catholic church. Cecil’s network had captured him coming to England in the first weeks of the new queen’s reign, with a knife hidden in his bags and a plan to assassinate her. Cecil’s man in the Tower had first tortured Brother Thomas, and then turned him. Now he was a spy against his former masters, serving the Protestants, against the faith of his fathers. Cecil knew that it had been a change of heart forced by the man’s desire to survive, and that very shortly the priest would turn again. But in the meantime, his material was invaluable, and he was scholar enough to write his reports and then translate them into Latin and then translate the Latin into code.

       Master Secretary, His Holiness is considering a ruling that will say that heretical monarchs can be justly defied by their subjects, and that such a defiance, even to armed rebellion, is no sin.

      Cecil leaned back in his padded chair and re-read the letter, making sure that he had made no error in the double translation, out of code and then out of Latin. It was a message of such enormity that he could not believe it, even when it was in plain English before him.

      It was a death sentence for the queen. It assured any disgruntled Catholic that they could plot against her with impunity, actually with the blessing of the Holy Father. It was a veritable crusade against the young queen, as potent and unpredictable as a Knights Templar attack on the Moors. It licensed the deranged assassin, the man with a grudge, indeed, it put the dagger into his hands. It broke the eternal promise that an anointed monarch commanded the obedience of all his subjects, even those who disagreed with him. It broke the harmony of the universe that placed God above the angels, angels above kings, kings above mortal men. A man could no more attack a king than a king could attack an angel, than an angel could attack God. This madness of the Pope broke the unwritten agreement that one earthly monarch would never encourage the subjects of another earthly monarch to rise up against him.

      The assumption had always been that kings should stick together, that nothing was more dangerous than the people with a licence. Now the Pope was to give the people a licence to rise up against Elizabeth and who knew how many might avail themselves of this permission?

      Cecil tried to draw a sheet of paper towards him and found that his hands were shaking. For the first time in these anxious months, he truly thought that they would be defeated. He thought that he had aligned himself to a doomed cause. He did not think that Elizabeth could survive this. There were too many who had opposed her from the start; once they knew that their treasonous plotting was no longer a sin, they would multiply like headlice. It was enough that she had to struggle with the church, with her council, with her parliament; none of which were in full support, some of which were in open opposition. If the people themselves were turned against her she could not last long.

      He thought for a moment, for only a moment, that he might have done better to have supported Henry Hastings as the best Protestant claimant for the throne, since the Pope would surely not have dared to summon a rebellion against a king. He thought for another moment that perhaps he should have urged Elizabeth to accept the raising of the Host, to have kept the church in England as Papist for a year or so, to ease the transition of Reform.

      He gritted his teeth. What was done had been done, and they would all have to live with their mistakes, and some would die for them. He was fairly certain that Elizabeth would die, to name only one. He clasped his hands together until they were steady again, and then started to plan ways to try to ensure that an assassin did not reach Elizabeth at court, when she was out hunting, when she was on the river, when she was visiting.

      It was a nightmare task. Cecil stayed up all night writing lists of men he could trust, preparing plans to see her guarded, and knew at the end that if the Catholics of England obeyed the Pope, as they must do, then Elizabeth was a dead woman, and all that Cecil could do for her was to delay her funeral.

      Amy Dudley had no letter from her husband to invite her to court, not even one to tell her where she should go. Instead she received a very pleasant invitation from his cousins at Bury St Edmunds.

      ‘See? He has sent for me!’ she said delightedly to her stepmother. ‘I told you that he would send for me, as soon as he was able to do so. I must leave as soon as his men arrive to escort me.’

      ‘I am so happy for you,’ Lady Robsart said. ‘Did he send any money?’

      Robert’s work, as Master of the Queen’s Horse, was to order her horses, to run the royal stables, to care for the health and welfare of every animal from the great hunters to the lowliest pack animals of the baggage train. Visiting noblemen, with their hundreds of men in livery, had to have their horses accommodated in the stables, guests of the queen had to be supplied with horses so that they could ride out with her. Ladies of her court had to have sweet-tempered palfreys. The queen’s champions had to stable their warhorses for jousting tournaments. The hounds for the hunt came under his jurisdiction, the falcons for falconry, the hawks for hawking, the leather and harness, the wagons and carts for the enormous royal progresses from one castle to another, the orders and delivery of hay and feed, all were the responsibility of Sir Robert.

      — So why then — Cecil asked himself — did the man have so much time on his hands? Why was he forever at the queen’s side? Since when was Robert Dudley interested in the coin of the realm and the deteriorating value? —

      ‘We have to mint new coins,’ Sir Robert announced. He had inserted himself into the queen’s morning conference with her advisor by the simple technique of bringing a sprig of greening leaves and laying them on her state papers. — As if he had gone a-Maying — Cecil thought bitterly. Elizabeth had smiled and made a gesture that he might stay, and now he was joining the conference.

      ‘The smaller coins are shaved and spoiled till they are almost worthless.’

      Cecil did not reply. This much was self-evident. Sir Thomas Gresham in his huge mercantile house at Antwerp had been studying the problem for years as his own business fluctuated catastrophically with the unreliable value of English coin, and as his loan business to the monarchs of England became more and more precarious. — But now apparently, far superior to Gresham’s opinions, we are to be blessed with the insights of Sir Robert Dudley. —

      ‘We have to call in the old coins and replace them with full-weight good coins.’

      The queen looked worried. ‘But the old coins have been so clipped and shaved that we will not get half our gold back.’

      ‘It has to be done,’ Dudley declared. ‘No-one knows the value of a penny, no-one trusts the value of a groat. If you try to collect an old debt, as I have done, you find that you are repaid in coins that are half the value of your original loan. When our merchants go abroad to pay for their purchases, they have to stand by while the foreign traders bring out scales to weigh