Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (24 page)

“His troupe was called the Earl of Leicester’s Men, was it not?” I asked. “The legendary James Burbage, builder of the first known modern English theater, was among the members of the troupe. Its motto was ‘more stars than there are in the heavens,’ wasn’t it?”

“No, Dolly,” said Mary, Queen of Scots. “That was the motto of a movie studio, called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, I believe. Mistress Greta Garbo mentioned it when she was here for advisement
about her motion picture career. We suggested that she be true to herself in her roles, and she responded by simply saying, ‘I want to be alone.’ We told her to go with that.”

“It worked for her too,” I said, remembering some of the first words spoken on film by the Swedish silent film star and how they had become her tagline.

“At any rate,” Margaret went on, “I entrusted my plays to Dudley, directing him to put them into the hands of his players. He was not to reveal my authorship of them until after I had died. I learned in the afterlife that he had not carried out my wishes exactly as I had expected him to.”

“Pretty rum of the man to bollocks up your last request that way.”

“Well, Dudley wasn’t exactly the only iron I had in the fire on this matter,” Margaret said. “I also employed a contingency plan to at least hint to posterity that my plays were mine.”

“A contingency plan?” I echoed.

“That’s what I said, Dolly,” Margaret affirmed as she fingered a brooch she was wearing. “I had a contingency plan.”

Chapter Sixty-Three

The Accessory That Tells a Story

I couldn’t help but notice the beautiful intricacy of the brooch that Margaret’s touch was calling my attention to. Realizing that I was staring at it, she invited me to have a closer look at it.

“Margaret—is that the famous Lennox Jewel?”

“It is, Dolly,” Margaret confirmed.

I’d read about the thousands of words of juvenilia that the Bronte children had scribbled into little booklets only inches high. They had produced a complex literary world that you could literally hold in the palm of your hand and close your fingers over. This brooch was surely the jeweler’s equivalent; romance, drama, tragedy, history, philosophy, inspiration, jewels, flora, and fauna, all in a colorful heart-shaped cameo well under three inches square.

Margaret removed the brooch and let me hold it in the palm of my hand. The intricacy of the piece was astonishing. It was replete with the kinds of images that I knew would have been highly symbolic to people in the Tudor world. But I, a woman of the twenty-first century, needed an interpreter if I was going to fully appreciate it.

“I admire this brooch tremendously, Margaret, but I’d be lying if I said I understood it. There is just so much going on! It’s like an HBO miniseries on a couple of inches of enamel.”

“This brooch, Dolly, carries symbols of my life, my loves, my royal heritage, my religion, and my family’s history,” Margaret informed me. “But in the interest of time, I will direct your attention to the bits of imagery that relate directly to my plays.”

“Go ahead and coach me on the brooch, Margaret!”

The jewel was even more multifaceted than I had realized at first glance. Margaret flipped open both a crown and a heart that appeared on the front of the brooch. This revealed, among other things, two hearts pierced by arrows, a green horn, two clasped hands, a skull and crossbones, and the words “death shall dissolve.” I touched them gently with my fingertip.

“References to
Romeo and Juliet
, surely,” I said. “And that green horn; what does that symbolize?”

“The horn is the time-honored symbol of the cuckold, Dolly; the man Troilus thought himself to be when his Cressida took up with another man.”

“And that skull and crossbones; is that the wholesale death and destruction of the Trojan War, as seen in
Troilus and Cressida
?”

Margaret nodded and revealed that the jewel could open yet again; she flipped up the entire front of it to reveal quite a scene.

“You see these two warriors, Dolly,” she said, pointing to one triumphant and one who was clearly in dire straits on the ground. “The fallen one is Richard III; the tall fellow, standing upright—obviously a fellow who would excel at the joust—is Henry VIII.”

I couldn’t help but notice the image adjacent to these two. “That lady being dragged by the hair by a man in a green shirt—is it a depiction of
The Taming of the Shrew
?” I inquired.

“Correct again, Dolly. And now I would direct your attention to two of the quotes on the jewel.”

I saw the words “Time causes all to learn” near the images of an hourglass and an unclad woman. Margaret closed the jewel, and I was again looking at its front. The white enamel border surrounding the jewel contained words that, if translated into
modern English, would read “Who hopes still constantly with patience shall obtain victory in their claim.”

“You covered all the bases, Margaret; all five of your plays and the acknowledgment of the waiting you were willing to do for the right time for all to be revealed about them,” I said. With that, I turned the jewel over to see what the back of it held in store. Among some pretty impressive dragons was a reclining fellow with what looked like a giant cockscomb flower—no pun intended—growing straight up out of his groin. The plant was at least as tall as the man was long, and the flower was golden.

“
That
doesn’t look very Shakespearian to me,” I said, pointing to the image.

“It is a highly personal and meaningful image to me, the details of which I have no need to share with you or anyone else. All you need to know, Dolly, is that it is indeed
not
Shakespearian. I suppose “Freudian” would be the better word for it.”

“You know about Freudian psychology?” I said, surprised.

“Yes, a Fraulein Anna Freud was among the guests brought here by the queens for career advice. She was thinking of going into her father’s line of business; who better to advise someone about that than the latter-generation Tudor women?”

“What advice was she given?” I asked.

“It was suggested that she capitalize on her father’s legacy but find a way to branch out and do something uniquely on her own. We never did learn how that went.”

“Pretty well, I think. Anna Freud made quite a name for herself specializing in the psychology of children.”

“Well, I am glad that worked out,” Margaret said, appearing relieved to have attention diverted from that giant groin flower.

“All right, Margaret,” I said. “The Lennox Jewel was your contingency plan for demonstrating to the world your authorship of your plays in the spirit of the Renaissance world and its absorption with symbolism. And I guess it is a good thing that you had a contingency plan if, as you said, Dudley didn’t carry out your last wishes the way he was supposed to. What exactly did the man do?”

Chapter Sixty-Four

Being Practical and Waxing Theatrical

“Dudley did with Margaret’s plays what he thought was best to do at the time,” Elizabeth said, taking the narrative over. “He took the trouble to read one of the five plays—
Henry VIII
. He did not find it impressive and assumed that the other four were of a similar quality. He passed them on to his theatrical troupe through James Burbage, feeling it was his duty to a dead friend to do so.”

“Seems legit so far.”

“Dudley did not tell Burbage who wrote the plays, feeling he was protecting the royal family from embarrassment. All Burbage was told was that the plays were written by a highborn lady and that Dudley was passing them on to him simply to satisfy a promise. Burbage, based on the opinion he got from Dudley, never bothered to do anything with the plays. Eventually, though, the plays found their way into the hands of Burbage’s son, Richard.”

“The same Richard Burbage who played with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men—the troupe associated with William Shakespeare. The same Richard Burbage who made a Shakespearian name for himself as an early Richard III and quite probably as an early Romeo as well,” I posited.

“Yes, Dolly, the same,” Elizabeth said. “Burbage had been told about the association of the plays with an unknown but very highborn lady. When he realized just how viable the plays were as contemporary theater, he was chomping at the bit to have them put into production. However, out of an abundance of caution, he decided to confer with someone in power regarding any possible political repercussions of going live with these mysteriously
sourced plays. It was well into the 1590s by this time; Dudley was dead. So he turned to—”

“William Cecil?” I asked.

“Correct this time, Dolly. Cecil, likewise one for an abundance of caution, asked to see the plays in question. Recognizing the handwriting of the plays and realizing they had been written by my late cousin Margaret, he brought them to me. I was not surprised to see the plays; Dudley had told me about that last dinner of his with Margaret. I was surprised, though, by the quality of the plays; my dear Dudley had missed the boat entirely by not reading all five of them.”

It occurred to me that Robert Dudley was a byword for missing the boat entirely, but I kept the thought to myself.

“As soon as I realized the excellence of Margaret’s plays, I instructed Cecil to go ahead and permit Burbage to use them,” Elizabeth said. “Margaret Douglas’s name, however, was to be kept strictly out of it, at least for the time being. Plays were not a common undertaking in the social world we lived in, and I had the Tudor family standard to maintain. Margaret may have been dead and past all worry on that score, but I was not. I directed Cecil to have Burbage and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men attribute the plays to one of their company. They suggested William Shakespeare, one of their actors, a poet, and a would-be playwright, for the time being. I myself would determine when the plays’ true provenance was to be made known to the world and how that news would be leaked. Shakespeare, Burbage, and the company were more than happy to take credit for such high-class
plays with no effort whatsoever, and only a modicum of discretion, required on their part.”

“Old Will must have been absolutely thunderstruck at having that kind of luck come his way,” I said. “Talk about an unbeatable, unrepeatable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!”

“Well, yes and no, Dolly,” said Jane. Proving herself a mighty princess, the slender little thing toted several large cushions over to where I was seated and, along with her sisters Mary and Catherine, hunkered down on the floor with me as Margaret vacated the vicinity. And thus with three if not fifty shades of Grey, yet another Tudor tale was about to unfold.

Chapter Sixty-Five

The History of the Sisters Grey, or the Thwarted Departed

The Grey sisters were a lesson in the word “thwarted,” even in a place as full of thwarted plans as the Tudor-era court was.

The eldest, Jane, has gone down in history as the Nine Days Queen. Her ambitious family put the adolescent on the throne for a brief spell after the death of Edward VI. She was arguably entitled to it, but Mary Tudor ousted young Jane and had her executed for the sake of the stability of the realm. History has painted Jane as scholarly and sweet, and my meeting with her the last time I was here had done nothing to disabuse me of that notion. On this occasion she was wearing what probably passed as a party dress, if you were the scholarly sort in the middle Renaissance. It was a very flattering fawn-colored number with jewel-tone embroidery.

Jane’s younger sisters, like Jane, were a very real threat to Mary Tudor’s throne, and later to Elizabeth I’s, because of the unquestioned legitimacy of their births and claims. Unlike Jane, neither Catherine nor Mary Grey went down as a byword for intelligence; in fact, quite the opposite.

The elder Jane having gotten all the brains in the Grey family, all the looks fell quite naturally to the lot of the second Grey daughter, Catherine. She was, quite simply, lovely. Unlike the demurely dressed Jane, Catherine knew how to use color, texture, and line to make an outfit count. Her natural blond beauty was emphasized and accentuated by the elegant black, white, and gold ensemble she was wearing.

With brains and looks already spoken for, there wasn’t much left for nature to bless the youngest Grey daughter with. Mary was tiny, well under five feet tall, and had an obvious scoliotic curve to her upper spine. Perhaps as a compensatory mechanism, the tiny Mary’s black-and-white outfit with pale salmon-colored accents was conspicuously sumptuous, embroidered to a never-you-mind and all about the pouf. I say
sumptuous
because it is hard to qualify overdressed when it comes to Elizabethan fashion; the girl did, after all, share DNA with the sartorially over-the-top Elizabeth I.

Mary Grey had a face that was homely in the good sense of the word. It was nonthreatening, simple, and wholesome—a face that aimed to please. There was something of the ovine in her expression; here we had a follower, not a leader, I thought.

“You got to know
me
the last time you were here, Dolly. I will therefore allow my sisters to tell you a little bit about themselves before I tell you what I have to say,” said Jane, bowing her head graciously toward her sister Catherine.

I wondered if I was about to hear, from the horse’s mouth, the actual facts about one of the Tudor era’s oddest marriages.

It turned out that I was. But that particular comedy of errors was just the tip of the iceberg.

Chapter Sixty-Six

On Disparaged Marriages

Catherine grasped the hand of her sister Mary before she addressed me.

“You are a Tudor scholar, Dolly. You know, therefore, that both Mary and I were, shall we say, unlucky in love.”

“Not unlucky in
love
, Catherine,” said Mary stoutly. “Unlucky in
marriage
, I would say, was more accurate. Neither of us have any complaint to make about the devotion of our husbands.”

“Granted, Mary,” said Catherine.

“Nor had we reason to complain about their personal attributes,” said Mary, blushing a little.

“You are one of those girls who believe that size matters, aren’t you, Mary?” I asked. “After all, you married Thomas Keyes, who was said to be almost seven feet tall.” It occurred to me that the pair of them must have been like the Mutt and Jeff of the Tudor court, but I did not give voice to the mental picture.