I have been brought so low between the plots of these two queens and their advisors that I don’t even want to sleep in my own bed with the carved coronet in the headboard. I don’t even want to walk through my own stone pillars with my crest emblazoned on every stone. I would give away all this outward show if I could just be at peace with myself once more. If I could just feel that I know my own self, my own wife, and my own queen once more. This uprising has, in the end, overthrown nothing but my peace of mind.
I see Bess’s son Henry and my own son Gilbert, but they are awkward in my presence and I suppose they have heard that I am suspected of betraying my wife with the Scots queen. They are both big favorites with Bess; it is natural that they should take her side against me. I dare not defend myself to them, and after asking them both for their health and if they are in debt, I let them go. They are both well, they both owe money; I suppose I should feel glad.
On the third day of waiting, when they judge that I have suffered enough, one of the ladiesinwaiting comes and tells me that the queen will see me in her private rooms after dinner. I find I cannot eat. I sit in my usual place in the great hall at a table with my equals, but they do not speak to me and I keep my head down like a whipped page. As soon as I can, I leave the table. I go and wait in her presence room again. I feel like a child, hoping for a word of kindness but certain of a beating.
At least I can be assured that I am not to be arrested. I should take a little comfort from that. If she was going to arrest me for treason she would do it in the full council meeting, so that they could all witness my humiliation as a warning to other fools. They would strip me of my titles; they would accuse me of disloyalty and send me away with my cap torn from my head and guards on either side of me. No, this is to be a private shaming. She will accuse me of failing her, and though I can point to my deeds and prove that I have never done anything that was not in her interests or as I was ordered, she can reply by pointing to the leniency of my guardianship of the queen and to the wide and growing belief that I am half in love with Mary Stuart. And in truth, if I am accused of loving her, I cannot honestly deny it. I think that I won’t deny it. I don’t even wish to deny it. A part of me, a mad part of me, longs to proclaim it.
As I thought, it is the gossip of that intimacy that upsets the queen more than anything else. When I am finally admitted into her privy chamber, with her women openly listening, and Cecil at her side, it is the first thing she raises.
“I would have thought that you of all men, Shrewsbury, would not be such a fool for a pretty face,” she spits out, almost as soon as I enter the room.
“I am not,” I say steadily.
“Not a fool? Or does she not have a pretty face?”
If she were a king, these sorts of questions would not be hurled out with such jealous energy. No man can answer such questions to the satisfaction of a woman of nearly forty years whose best looks are long behind her, about her rival, the most beautiful woman in the world and not yet thirty. “I am sure that I am a fool,” I say quietly. “But I am not a fool for her.”
“You let her do whatever she wanted.”
“I let her do what I thought was right,” I say wearily. “I let her ride out, as I was ordered to do, for the benefit to her health. She has grown sick under my care, and I regret it. I let her sit with my wife and sew together for the company. I know for a fact that they never talked of anything but empty chitchat.”
I see the gleam in her dark eyes at this. She has always prided herself in having the intelligence and education