riding down their lanes, they are showing their true colors: their loyalty to her, their constancy to their faith. They are hers, heart and soul, and I do not know if Cecil had considered this when he ordered me to move her to Tutbury. I don’t know if he understands how little sway Queen Elizabeth, and her faith, has in these northern counties. Perhaps he should have taken her further south? But perhaps everywhere she goes she will be passionately loved. There are Papists, God knows, everywhere in England; perhaps half the country believes that this is our true queen, and the other half will love her when they see her.
This queen, as equally famous for her piety as she is notorious for her lust, wears a rosary at her belt and a crucifix at her throat where I sometimes see her blush rise; she flushes pink like a girl. The Pope himself prays for her by name as she rides through mortal peril. At the worst moments, when we are halfmobbed by a crowd of people quietly whispering blessings on her, I am afraid they would prefer her on the throne and the church unreformed and unchanged than all the benefits that Queen Elizabeth has brought them.
Because these are not people like my Bess—middling people who saw their chance and snatched at profits in the times of change; these are the poor who used to go to the abbey for their hurts and their fears, who liked the priest coming to them for their deathbeds and christenings. They don’t like the churches pulled down, the sanctuaries made unsafe, the nuns with their healing hospitals driven away. They don’t know where to pray, now that the shrines have been destroyed; they don’t know who will help them, now that they cannot light a candle for a saint. They don’t understand that holy water is not holy anymore, that the stoups are dry. They don’t know where they can claim sanctuary now that the abbeys are closed; they don’t know who will feed them in time of need now that the abbey kitchens are destroyed and the kitchen fires gone cold. Barren women cannot go on pilgrimage to a sacred well; sick men cannot hobble to a shrine. They know themselves to be bereft. Undeniably, they have been robbed of much that made their lives happier. And they think that this exquisite other queen, dressed in black with a veil of white, as seductive as a novice nun, will bring back all the good things for them, and they crowd around her and tell her that good times will come again, that she must wait, as they will wait for her, until I have to shout at the guard to push them away.
Perhaps it is no more than the trivial matter of her beauty. People are so foolish over a beautiful woman, they attribute all sorts of magic to her for nothing more than the set of her dark eyes and the thickness of her dark eyelashes. They come to the roadside to stare for curiosity and then they stay and call blessings on her in the hopes of seeing her smile. She raises her hand in thanks; I have to say, she does have extraordinary grace. She smiles at each and every one of them as a private greeting. Everyone who sees her is besotted: hers for life. She has such a presence that nobody ever asks me which of the women in the traveling cloaks is the queen. She is slim like a thoroughbred horse, but tall, tall as a man. She carries herself like a queen and every eye is drawn to her. When she rides by, there is a whisper of admiration like a breeze, and this adoration has blown around her all her life. She carries her beauty like a crown and she laughs and gives a little shrug at the constant admiration she attracts, as if it is a cloak that someone has dropped: ermine, around her pale shoulders.
They throw evergreen leaves down on the road before her since they don’t have flowers in this wintry season. At every stop someone presses pots of honey and preserves on us for her pleasure. The women bring out rosaries for her to touch as if she were a saint, and I have to look the other way, for the rosaries themselves are against the law now. Or at any rate, I think so. The laws change so