CHAPTER XV
RUTH AND JOYUSITIE
The dashing suitor of Mary of Scotland, Don John of Austria, was dead. Her rival was on the edge of a marriage with a son of Mary’s stoutest champion—France. It was a bad moment for the prisoner. It was not a pleasant time for the Talbots. Life at Sheffield could be varied only by letters from Gilbert, though his parents must to some extent have been cheered by the prospect of his speedily having another heir. His wife was attended by no less a person than the famous physician of my Lord of Leicester, a certain Mr. Julio, who seems, on all accounts, to have known a great deal too much about the unholy drugs which the Medici found so useful, though his skill as a physician could not be gainsaid. Gilbert Talbot at least seems flourishing. He is free to come and go; he is quite a “citizen of the world.” He executes commissions for his family, his purchases are practical, and he is thoughtful for his stepmother’s needs. “There are two Friesland horses,” he writes, “of a reasonable price for their goodness; I have promised the fellow for them £33; I think them especial good for my Ladyship’s coach; I will send them down.” He despatches constant reports of his wife’s health, and of the repairs and decorations which he is superintending in “Shrewsbury House,” otherwise the Earl’s house in “Broad Street” from which Gilbert writes. A special ceiling was being designed for this, the building was to be newly glazed, and the family coat-of-arms inserted in the windows in stained glass. In a postscript he heralds a private letter from the Queen to Lady Shrewsbury, which is not forthcoming. “My Lord, my brother[[59]] tarrieth only for her Majesty’s letter to my Lady, which, she saith, she will write in her own hand, so as nobody shall be acquainted with a word therein till my Lady receive it. I have not seen her look better a great while, neither better disposed; the living God continue it.”
The composition of this young gentleman is always rather vague and his punctuation hazy. He means, of course, that it is the Queen who is in such good health and humour. She was very busy puzzling everyone over her projected marriage, and sketching Court entertainments in connection with it. Even while she felt the gravity of such a step she would dally with it, thrust away apparently all but the lighter side of things. She kept her Privy Council sitting “from eight o’clock in the morning until dinner-time; and presently after dinner, and an hour’s conference with her Majesty’s Council again, and so till supper-time.” All this strain was induced, Gilbert assures the household at Sheffield, by “the matter of Monsigneur coming here, his entertainment here, and what demands are to be made unto him in the treaty of marriage ...; and I can assure your Lordship it is verily thought this marriage will come to pass of a great sort of wise men; yet nevertheless there are divers others like Sr. Thomas of Jude who would not believe till he had both seen and felt. It is said that Monseigneur will certainly be here in May next.... It is said that he will be accompanied with three dukes, ten earls, and a hundred other gentlemen.”
The suitor came—but more or less secretly—and departed. It was not till nearly a year later that the cat-and-mouse game which Elizabeth played with him approached a crisis in the shape of a splendid pageant at Whitehall, which she organised to dazzle the French Ambassador, and to give the impression that this affair was really to be accomplished. Gay times those—with Sir Philip Sidney’s art and grace to lead the pomps and ceremonies! Everyone of importance was invited. “Her talk,”[[60]] says a contemporary of Elizabeth, “was of tournaments and balls; her one desire was that the fairest ladies in England should grace her Court. The Lords were bidden to bring their families to London that there might be the bustle of constant gaiety. The merchants were ordered to sell their silks, velvets, and cloth of gold at a reduction of a quarter of the ordinary price that more should be induced to buy, and so enhance the general splendour.”
Alack for the Shrewsburys! No gay invitation appears to have summoned them from the wilds of their county to witness the famous pageant and the battle of flowers and perfumes waged this year in the tiltyard at Whitehall, or applaud the splendid chariot of “my Lady Desire” and her four gallant sons, of whom Sir Philip Sidney personated one.
Such happiness and all that which Mary of Scotland, in a letter, termed “joyusitie” was a thing apart from existence at Sheffield, and she, who loved all such fantastical gaieties, who knew as much as any of them of love practices and flowery games, who could play even with peasant folk like a child, looked wistfully forth upon the world from the leads of her castle-prison or from the meadows close to the Lodge, its neighbour. From 1579 to 1581 her affairs and those of the Talbots are full of small events, things which kept them alert, yet brought but little result. The Earl was watched closely by Elizabeth. He could not even leave home for two days without sharp reprimand, although he never absented himself for an hour without knowing that his prisoner was absolutely secure, while his servants kept him carefully informed of her condition. One of them, for example, by name George Skargelle, a constant eye-witness of the Shrewsbury tragi-comedy, not only reports upon the prisoner, but scours the immediate neighbourhood to see what is going on: “May yt plese your honner to understand that your L’ house is quyet and well, God be pressed; and the Quene is sarvet wth. her vetteles and wille plesed for thes II dayes.” He goes to the Castle gardens “to see what stir there was of your Lordship’s follkes” and found certain fellows playing at dice, while in the town of Sheffield he discovered other gamblers at cards. After this he breaks a lance in speech with his master’s truculent “bad tenants of Glossopdale,” whom he so mistrusted that he gave information of their presence to the men at the bridges and the watches, and to the owners of the houses where the travellers lodged. The Queen heard of the Earl’s absence (for there were always people ready to report the least movement of so notable a county resident), and belaboured him in a letter. He begged her to allow him to come to Court and justify himself. For many reasons he longed to do this. He was weary of writing endless letters to her and to the Treasury. His personal debts weighed on his conscience, and his enemies were always trying to make out that he could not be in any need of supplies because of his large estates. Big houses are big thieves, and what with his large double family and the costs entailed by his position, even his trade projects—he was among other things an owner of lead and exporter of it—did not keep him in sufficient ready money to maintain all his houses and fulfil his landlord’s liabilities as he would have wished. He was not personally an extravagant man, and displays none of the magnificent tastes of his wife in regard to his house and person. He declared that his creditors should be satisfied rather than he should use expensive household articles. “I would have you buy me glasses to drink in,” he wrote in 1580 to his servant Baldwin. “Send me word what old plate yields the ounce, for I will not leave me a cup to drink in, but I will see the next term my creditors paid.” He may have made a special point of this in order that Baldwin should use the statement as a pathetic plea when making application to the Treasury for payments due to his master, the main reason the Earl had for keeping his representative in London. He had felt deeply the false reports of his income spread about by local detractors, who were probably also responsible for the statement that he was now keeping his prisoner on short commons. His sensations and those of the Countess on hearing of this from Lord Leicester can well be imagined. The statement had been handed on to him by the French Ambassador in London, and Leicester told him it would “much mislike her Majesty.”
The accusation runs: “That your Lordship doth of late keep the Scotch Queen very barely of her diet, insomuch as on Easter day last she had both so few dishes and so bad meat in them as it was too bad to see it; and that she finding fault thereat your Lordship should answer that you were cut off your allowance, and therefore could yield her no better.”
And yet Shrewsbury could forgive the Queen’s suspicions and, tolerably happy in the birth of a granddaughter, despite the fact that a male heir to Gilbert would have rejoiced him far more, instructed his son Francis to present for him a New Year’s present to Elizabeth.
Simultaneously no time was lost, no trouble grudged in worrying Burghley, “her Majesty’s housewife” as the Earl rather ironically terms him in one letter, with regard to a settlement of the everlasting claim for “this Queen’s diet.” Indeed, one can only imagine that this word “diet,” by which the cost of the board of the Scottish Mary is always signified in succeeding correspondence, must have held in the Earl’s mind and heart the same place as the name of Calais in the mind of Mary of England. Robert Beale, a clerk of the Privy Council and personal friend of the Shrewsburys, did his best for them, but despite his kindly despatches—one of which has a pretty allusion to “my little Lady Favour,” evidently Lady Arabella Stuart—payment was tardy. Even the scanty allowance originally decided upon had been deliberately reduced by royal order. For the hundredth time he tackled anew the official “housewife” with the words: “I have made suit to her Highness for some recompense, in which I do find so cold comfort that I am near driven to despair to obtain anything.” Elsewhere he speaks pathetically of “the cark and care” which is his portion. “My riches they talk of are in other men’s purses,” he complains bitterly; “God knows I make many shifts to keep me out of debt and to help my children, which are heavy burdens though comfortable, so long as they do well. I can say no more, but I have spies near about me and know them well.”
At last, in the August of 1582, in sheer despair of obtaining satisfaction, and sick of employing intermediaries, he wrote to the Queen:—