Free The Men Who Would Be King by Josephine Ross Page B

her.
    A group of Mary’s leading councillors came to interrogate Elizabeth, but she was as alert and elusive as she had been six years before during the Seymour investigation, and more experienced in self-preservation; and the evidence against her was scanty. There was even a moment when she had the mastery—when the dark-bearded Earl of Arundel suddenly dropped to his knees, and exclaimed: “Your Grace saith true, and certainly we are very sorry to have so troubled you with so vain matters!” Something of her “spirit full of enchantment” must have beguiled him, and perhaps in her need for an ally Elizabeth gave him surreptitious encouragement, for when she came to the throne, the middle-aged widower Arundel was strangely prompt to present himself as a suitor for her hand.
    â€œThe lawyers find no sufficient evidence to condemn her,” Renard reported, with bitter frustration. Bishop Gardiner, in his eagerness to protect Courtenay, served as a shield for Elizabeth too; he conveniently mislaid a valuable letter, intercepted from de Noailles’s dispatches, which was said to prove “that Courtenay was to marry the Lady Elizabeth, while the Queen should lose her crown and her life.” Renard claimed it would have served to convict Courtenay and Elizabeth, but without firm evidence Mary steadfastly refused to condemn her half sister, and before long, to Renard’s annoyance, Elizabeth was granted the privilege of walking in the Tower garden.
    From those walks, restricted, but precious to a prisoner, arose a little incident that was at once touching, pleasurable, and dangerous. A small boy, the son of one of the warders, took to bringing her bunches of flowers in which, it was said, messages were concealed. The council heard of it, and forbade it; Renard at once took the improbable view that Courtenay was involved, and reported that he had chosen this means to “present his commendations to Elizabeth.” Courtenay had neither the inclination nor the ingenuity to send his regards to Elizabeth by such a method, but there was another old acquaintance of hers then captive in the Tower who might well have done so—Robert Dudley.
    His father, Northumberland, had gone groveling to the scaffold soon after Mary’s coronation, and the pitiful young husband and wife Guildford Dudley and Jane Grey had been executed just before Elizabeth was brought to the Tower, but Robert, though sentenced to the horrible death of hanging, drawing, and quartering, was still a prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower with his three remaining brothers. For active young men the Tower offered little occupation; they composed an elaborate poem and design based on their own names, and began to carve it on the wall of the octagonal chamber, but gave up, as though bored, before it was finished; it was quite likely that the resourceful Robert, who always enjoyed dabbling in intrigue, should have whiled away some time in devising a means of communicating with his attractive young fellow prisoner the Lady Elizabeth. “Youth must have some dalliance,” and even the most closely guarded inmates of the Tower might find opportunities for clandestine relationships, as was proved in Elizabeth’s own reign, when Lady Catherine Grey, a dangerous claimant to the throne, managed to conceive a child by her husband while both were straitly confined in separate prisons within the Tower. To have been near one another and in furtive correspondence, at the darkest moment in both their lives, may have given Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley a sense of affinity from which later developed their lifelong bond of loving intimacy. Perhaps Robert Dudley’s resolute pursuit of the future queen could truly be said to have begun in that walled and sunless spring of 1554.
    â€œThe question of the day is: what shall be done with her?” wrote Renard. “Some people have said the best thing would be to marry her to a