cost of things, and the profit from things, and the balancing of the books. Only a woman who has been poor would know the heartfelt sense of relief that comes from looking at the household accounts books and seeing a profit. There is nothing that warms my heart more than knowing that I am safe in my house, with cash in my treasure room, with land at my doorstep, and my children endowed or well married. Nothing in the world is better for me than the sense that I have money in my purse and that no one can rob me.
This should be a strength of course, but it means that any loss strikes me hard. For within the first week of having the Scots queen as our guest, I have a letter from the Lord Treasurer’s office telling me that we will be paid fiftytwo pounds a week for hosting the Queen of Scots. Fiftytwo pounds! A week!
After my initial dismay I cannot say that I am surprised. Anyone who has served at court knows that Queen Elizabeth is as mean with her money as when she was a bankrupt princess. She was brought up as a girl who was sometimes heir, sometimes pauper, and it has left her with a terrible habit of pennypinching. She is as bad as I am for keeping watch over a groat. She is worse than me, for it is her trade as queen to be generous, whereas it is my trade as a subject to turn a profit.
I look at the letter again. I calculate that she is offering us about a quarter of what we are paying out at present for the pleasure of housing and entertaining our guest. They, in London, have calculated that this queen will be served with thirty people and have a stable of six horses. In truth she has a household of double that number as well as a good hundred of troublemakers and admirers and followers who have settled in Tutbury and nearby but visit us constantly, especially at mealtimes. We are not housing a guest with a retinue, we are housing a full royal court. Clearly, the treasury will have to pay us more. Clearly, this Scots queen’s companions will have to be sent back to their homes. Clearly, I shall have to persuade my husband to make these unwanted announcements, since no one else can tell the two queens that their arrangements are unworkable. My difficulty is that George will not like to do this, being a lord who has never had to deal with money and never in his life drawn up an accounts sheet. I doubt I can even make him understand that we can barely afford this, not now, not for this month, certainly not till midsummer.
In the meantime I will have to send to my steward at Chatsworth and tell him to take some of the smaller pieces of silver down to London and sell them for cash. I cannot wait for the rents at quarter day; I have to buy things in Tutbury and pay extra servants, and for this I need more coin than I earn. I could laugh at my own sense of loss when I write to him to sell half a dozen silver plates. I have never used them but they are mine, hoarded away in my own treasure room. To sell them for their value as scrap is as painful to me as a personal loss.
At midday the hunting party comes home. If they have killed on the hunt then the meat goes straight to the kitchens and is an essential addition to the provisioning of this great household. We dine all together in my lodgings, on this sunny side of the courtyard, and in the afternoon the queen often sits with me in my presence chamber, for the light is better for sewing, and the room brighter, and her women can sit with mine and we can all talk.
We talk as women always do: inconsequentially but with enthusiasm. She is the greatest needlewoman I have ever met; she is the only woman I have ever known whose ability and love of sewing matches mine. She has wonderful pattern books that arrive, travelstained but intact, from Edinburgh Castle, and she falls on them like a child and shows me the pictures and explains them to me. She has patterns for Latin inscriptions and classical designs that all mean different things. They are beautiful