When I shall pledge in saucers full
Of milk, on which the kitten thrives,
Feline felicities to you
And nine extremely prosperous lives.
Scenes in the Life of a Princess
Charles Whibley
Ashridge
When Queen Mary was persuaded, falsely, that her throne could be made safe only by the death of her sister, then but eighteen years old, the Princess Elizabeth lay sick at Ashridge. One spring morning, as she tossed abed, ’twixt sleeping and waking, in the weariness of fever, she heard in the courtyard beneath her window the tramp of men, the clatter of horses’ hoofs. Her affrighted servants brought her word that a guard of two hundred and fifty horsemen attended the Lords, who came with messages from the Queen, a guard larger than enough to keep watch over so frail a Princess. The house being thus begirt, Lord Thame and his companions, thrust their way into the presence of the Princess. To her demand that if not for courtesy, yet for modesty’s sake, they should put off the delivery of their message till the morrow, they answered that their commission was to bring her to London, alive or dead.
“A sore commission,” said the Princess, but a commission not to be gainsaid. And the Queen’s doctors showed her little pity. She might be removed, said they, not without danger, yet without death.
So on the morrow, the sad cavalcade set forth. The Princess, that she might be the more darkly shielded from the public gaze, was borne in the Queen’s own litter, which she presently bade to be opened, and thus she made her progress to Whitehall in the full view of the people. It was a tedious and a painful journey. From Ashridge, by St. Alban’s, she came to South Mymms, where again she rested her weary body, and not until four suns had set did she reach the inhospitable Court of Mary, her Queen and her sister.