be hanged and disemboweled while still alive and cut into pieces. D’you not think I have been dreading this?”
She blinks. “I didn’t realize.”
“No,” I say. “But when Cecil attacks the old lords, this is the consequence. We are all torn by his ambition. Men who have loved each other all their lives are thrown one against the other. Only you and Cecil don’t see this, for you don’t understand that the old lords are as a family of brothers. Newcomers cannot know this. You look for conspiracies; you don’t understand brotherhood.”
Bess does not even defend herself. “If Norfolk had not engaged to marry the Queen of Scots in secret, then he would not have been in trouble,” she says stoutly. “It is nothing to do with Cecil’s ambitions. It is all Norfolk’s own fault. His own ambitions. Perhaps now that he has withdrawn, we can all be at peace again.”
“What d’you mean, withdrawn?” I ask.
She has to hide a smile. “It seems your great friend is not very gallant to his ladylove. Not very chivalrous at all. Not only has he given her up and broken off the betrothal; apparently he also suggested that she should take his place in the Tower, as surety for his good behavior. It seems that there is one man at least who does not long to die for love of her. One who would happily see her in the Tower for treason. One man who is quite prepared to walk away from her and make a better life for himself without her at all.”
1570, JUNE, CHATSWORTH: BESS
There is no peace for a woman who tries to run a proper household with a spendthrift guest and a husband who is a fool. The greater the queen’s freedom, the greater the expense for us. Now I am told that she can entertain visitors, and every sensationseeking gawper in the country comes to watch her dine and help themselves to some dinner as they do. Her wine bill alone is more in a month than mine is in a year. I cannot begin to balance the accounts; they are beyond me. For the first time in my life I look at my books without pleasure but with absolute despair. The pile of bills grows all the time and she brings in no income at all.
Out goes the money on the queen: her luxuries, her servants, her horses, her pets, her messengers, her guards, the silk for her embroidery, the damask for her gowns, the linen for her bed, the herbs, the oils, the perfumes for her dressing table. The coal for her fire, the best wax candles, which she burns from midday till two in the morning. She has them burning while she is asleep, lighting empty rooms. She has silken carpets for her table— she even puts my best Turkey carpets on the floor. She has to have special goods for her kitchen, sugars and spices all have to come from London, her special soap for her laundry, the special starch for her linen, the special shoes for her horses. Wine for the table, wine for her servants, and—unbelievably—best white wine for her to wash her face. My accounts for keeping the Scots queen are a joke; they have only one side: expenditure. On the income side of the page there is nothing. Not even the fiftytwo pounds a week we were promised for her. Nothing. There are no pages of receipts, since there are no receipts. I begin to think there never will be, and we will go on like this until we are utterly ruined.
And I can now say with certainty we will be ruined. No house in the land could keep a queen with limitless numbers of servants, with numberless friends and hangerson. To keep a queen you need the income of a kingdom and the right to set a tax, and that we do not have. We were once a wealthy couple, wealthy in land, rents, mines, and shipping. But all these businesses have a balance of money coming in slowly and quickly going out. It was a balance which I managed superbly well. The Scots queen has thrown this balance all wrong. Quickly, amazingly quickly, we are becoming poor.
I shall have to sell land on a great scale. The little borrowings and sales I have bodged together since she arrived will no longer suffice. I shall have to raise mortgages. I shall have to enclose and put up the rents for