have to stick together, that if the people pull me down and call me a whore, then what is to stop their abusing her? But she is slow, oh God! She is so slow! She is as sluggish as a stupid man, and I cannot abide slowness and stupidity. While I demand safe conduct to France—for my French family will restore me to my throne in Scotland at once—she havers and dithers and calls for an inquiry and sends for lawyers and advisors and judges and they all convene in Westminster Palace.
To judge what, for God’s sake? To inquire into what? For what is there to know? Exactement! Nothing! They say that when my husband, the fool Darnley, killed David Rizzio, I swore vengeance and persuaded my next lover the Earl of Bothwell to blow him out of his bed with gunpowder and then to strangle him as he ran naked through the garden.
Madness! As if I should ever allow an assault on one of royal blood, even for my own vengeance. My husband must be as inviolable as myself. A royal person is sacred as a god. As if anyone with half a wit would commission such a ridiculous plot. Only an idiot would blow up a whole house to kill a man when he could easily smother him with a quiet pillow in his sottish sleep! As if Bothwell, the cleverest and wickedest man in Scotland, would use half a dozen men and barrels of gunpowder, when a dark night and a sharp knife would do the deed.
Finally, and worst of all, they say that I rewarded this incompetent assassination by running off with the assassin, the Earl of Bothwell, conceiving children in adulterous lust, marrying him for love, and declaring war against my own people for sheer wickedness.
I am innocent of this, and of the murder. That is the simple truth and those who cannot believe it have made up their minds to hate me already for my wealth, for my beauty, for my religion, or because I was born to greatness. The accusations are nothing but vile slander, calomnie vile. But it is sheer folly to repeat it word for word, as Elizabeth’s inquiry intends to do. Utter idiocy to give it the credence of an official inquiry. If you dare to say that Elizabeth is unchaste with Robert Dudley or any other of the halfdozen men who have been named with her through her scandalous years, starting with her own stepfather Thomas Seymour when she was a girl, then you are dragged before a justice of the peace and your tongue is slit by the blacksmith. And this is right and proper. A queen’s reputation must be untouched by comment. A queen must seem to be perfect.
But if you say that I am unchaste—a fellow queen, anointed just as she is, and with royal blood on both sides that she lacks—then you can repeat this in Westminster Palace before whoever cares to come by to listen, and call it evidence.
Why would she be such a fool as to encourage gossip about a queen? Can she not see that when she allows them to slander me she damages not just me but my estate, which is exactly the same as her own? Disrespect to me will wipe the shine off her. We should both defend our state.
I am a queen; different rules apply for queens. I have had to endure events as a woman that I would never even name as a queen. I would not stoop to acknowledge them. Yes, I have been kidnapped, I have been imprisoned, I have been raped—but I will never, never complain of it. As a queen my person must be inviolate, my body is always holy, my presence is sacred. Shall I lose that powerful magic for the benefit of moaning on about my injuries? Shall I trade majesty itself for the pleasure of a word of sympathy? Would I prefer to command, or do I long to whimper about my wrongs? Shall I order men, or shall I weep at the fireside with other injured women?
Of course. The answer to this is simple. Bien sûr. No one must ever pity me. They can love me or hate me or fear me. But I shall never let anyone pity me. Of course, when they ask me, did Bothwell abuse you? I will answer nothing, not at all, never a word. A queen does not complain that she has been