The Ladies of Grace Adieu

Antickes and Frets

In the spring of 1568 Mary, Queen of Scots, fearing the wrath of her subjects, crossed the border into England. Once arrived, she wrote a letter to her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, explaining her predicament and begging for her protection. Elizabeth wrote back, expressing her shock that subjects should behave so wickedly towards their lawful and divinely appointed Prince. But privately she considered how Mary had often laid claim to the English throne. She also thought how Mary had had a most baleful influence upon her Scottish subjects, how she had been an instigator of civil wars and the cause of several murders.

With many regrets, Elizabeth cast the Queen of Scots into prison for the rest of her life.

The Queen of Scots was given into the care of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a quiet gentleman of moderate abilities who was remarkable for two things – his vast wealth and his wife, a lady who was greatly esteemed by Queen Elizabeth. The Earl brought the Queen of Scots to Tutbury Castle, an ancient grey tower on the borders of Derbyshire and Staffordshire.

From the roof of this castle she looked down. Once she had laid claim to three thrones; now her world was shrunk to this view of a muddy ditch and a dark hillside.

How had this happened? In the royal courts of Europe her fall had been a matter of common prediction for many years. Her decisions had been catastrophic, her love affairs scandalous. She had been a comet; and her blazing descent through dark skies had been plain for all to see. But the Queen herself was amazed at this sudden change in her fortunes – amazed and very much inclined to blame someone.

Elizabeth, she thought, had done this to her. Elizabeth and England. The Queen gazed about her at the gloomy winter landscape. The pallor of the sky seemed to her to be Elizabeth 's white complexion. The chill wind on her cheek was Elizabeth 's breath. The glint of a river seen through winter trees was the bright spark of malice in Elizabeth 's eye.

The Queen of Scots felt she had dwindled, until she was nothing more than a flea upon Elizabeth 's body or, at best, a mouse in the hem of her gown. With a wail the Queen cast herself down and began to weep and to beat her hands on the stones. The soldiers who guarded her were amazed to witness such behaviour, but her French and Scottish attendants were not much disturbed. They had seen it all before.

They carried her to her chamber and laid her upon the bed. Her lady-in-waiting, Mrs Seton, sat down beside her and tried to distract her with gossip.

Mrs Seton told her how the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury, though both middle-aged, had not been married long. She said that the Countess had not been born into any great family, indeed that she was scarcely more than a farmer's daughter, but had achieved her present rank by marrying four husbands, each richer and greater than the one before.

"Quatre maris!" exclaimed the Queen of Scots, whose first language was French. "Mais elle a des yeux de pourceau!" (Four husbands! But she has piggy-eyes!)

Mrs Seton laughed in agreement.

Four husbands! thought the Queen of Scots. And the first three dying in so convenient a manner! – just when the farmer's daughter had grown into her new rank and might be wishing for a greater. The Queen of Scots's husbands had never consulted her convenience in their dying. Her first, the King of France, had died at the age of sixteen and so she had lost the French throne – a circumstance that had caused her great pain. Her second husband (whom she had hated and wished dead) had fallen ill in the most tantalising way, but had utterly failed to die – until some kind person had first blown him up and then strangled him.

This suggested an idea to the Queen of Scots. "Did the Countess's husbands all die naturally?" she asked.

Mrs Seton snorted in ridicule and leant closer. "Her first husband was no more than a boy! The Countess – who was only plain Bess Hardwick then – embroidered him a coat all chequered over with black and white squares. And, after he had worn it a few times, he began to complain that the whole world had become to him nothing but black and white squares. Every dark tabletop seemed to him a gaping black hole that meant to swallow him up and every window filled with white winter light was ghostly to him and full of malicious intent. And so he died, raving about it."

The Queen of Scots was impressed. She had heard of a poisonous dart sewn into a bodice to pierce the flesh, but she had never heard of anyone being killed by embroidery before. She herself was very fond of embroidery.

She remembered how she had fancied herself a mouse in Elizabeth 's skirts. A needle, she thought, was a most suitable weapon for a mouse – mouse-sized, in fact. And if Elizabeth were to die of that needle (or indeed of anything else) then the Queen of Scots would surely be Queen of the English too.

Tutbury Castle was cold and evil-smelling. It was also rather small and so they did not have to walk far before they found the Countess, seated at her needlework.

The Queen asked the Countess what she was embroidering.

"A picture of a beautiful palace in a sweet country," said the Countess and showed the Queen. "As I sew I like to fancy that my children and grandchildren will one day live in houses such as this. It is a foolish idea, no doubt, but it passes the time pleasantly."

The Queen of Scots rolled her eyes at Mrs Seton to express her astonishment at the presumption of the farmer's daughter.

The Countess saw what the Queen did but she was not in the least abashed.

Then the Queen of Scots began to talk of embroidery, and of husbands, and of the death of husbands; and just for good measure she threw in a few references to black and white chequering.

The Countess replied blandly that embroidery was a very charming way to pass the time, and husbands were generally a good thing, and their death much to be regretted.

The Queen frowned. She had heard that the Countess was a very clever woman. Surely she must understand what was meant?

The Queen said, "I should like to send a present to my dear sister, the Queen of England. A piece of embroidery that I intend to work with my own hands. The work will be nothing but a pleasure to me for I declare that I love the Queen of England better than anyone else in the world."

"As everyone must who sees her," agreed the Countess piously.

"Quite," said the Queen of Scots and then she began to speak of how great Princes rewarded those who helped them.

The Countess looked neither excited nor fearful at these hints and insinuations of future greatness. She gazed calmly back at the Queen.

The Queen brought out a book filled with quaint pictures which might be adapted for needlework. There were cockatrices and lions and manticores – all sorts of beasts which (the Queen hoped) might be made to tear Elizabeth to pieces through the means of magic and embroidery.

The Countess dutifully admired the pictures, but offered no opinion as to which the Queen should choose.

Henceforth every morning the Queen, the Countess and Mrs Seton sat down to embroider together. Gathered in the light of the window with their heads bent over their work, they grew very friendly. The Queen embroidered a pair of gloves for Elizabeth, which she decorated with pictures of sea monsters amid blue and silver waves. But though she filled the monsters' mouths with sharp-looking teeth, Elizabeth was not bitten by anything; nor did she drown.

The Earl of Shrewsbury sent a letter to Queen Elizabeth saying that the Scottish Queen passed her time very innocently. This was not in the least true: when she was not at her needlework, she was secretly intriguing with English malcontents who wanted to assassinate Elizabeth and she also wrote letters to the Kings of Spain and France cordially inviting them to invade England. But she did not forget to admire the Countess's needlework and to talk, every now and then, of black and white chequering.

But the years went by; Elizabeth was as healthy as ever, no one invaded and the Queen grew tired of paying the Countess compliments. She said to Mrs Seton, "She is obstinate, but I have magic of my own. And if she will not help me then I will use it against her. After all I know what it is that she loves the best."

Then the Queen combed and dressed her red-brown hair. She put on a gown of violet-brown velvet embroidered with silver and pearls. She called the Earl to her chamber and made him sit at her side and smiled at him and told him that of all the gentlemen who attended her, it was he whom she trusted the most. Day after day she made him many sweet speeches, until the poor old gentleman did not know whether he was on his head or his heels and was very near falling in love with her.

Mrs Seton watched all this with a puzzled air. "But I do not think it is the Earl that the Countess loves the best," she said to the Queen.

"The Earl!" The Queen burst out laughing. "No, indeed! Whoever said it was? But she loves his money and his lands. She desires that they shall be given to her children and grandchildren. It is all she ever thinks of."

Word reached the Countess of what was happening, as the Queen knew it must, but no sign of anger appeared on her broad Derbyshire face. The next time that the three ladies were seated at their embroidery, the Queen revived the old question of what present would please the Queen of England best.

"A skirt," said the Countess of Shrewsbury in the most decisive manner. "A skirt of white satin. Her Majesty loves new clothes."

The Queen of Scots smiled. "As do we all. And what shall the devices be?"

"Let it be powdered with little pink carnations," said the Countess.

"Little pink carnations?" said the Queen of Scots. "Yes," said the Countess.

So somewhat doubtfully (for she would have much preferred poisonous snakes and spiders) the Queen of Scots embroidered a skirt of white satin with little pink carnations; and sent it to the Queen of England. Not many weeks later she heard that Elizabeth had got the pox. Her white skin was all over pink pustules!

The Queen of Scots clapped her hands together in delight. Over the next week or so she drew up a list of the great lords and bishops of England. She cast her mind back over the years of her imprisonment, recalling past slights and kindnesses, considering who should live and be rewarded, and who should be sent to the Tower and die.

Then a day came when the wind blew and the rain lashed the glass, and the Countess entered the Queen's room unannounced. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She brought news, she said. Queen Elizabeth's advisers and councilmen had been put into a great fright by Her Majesty's illness and what had terrified them most of all was the thought that the Queen of Scots might become Queen of England. "For," said the Countess heartlessly, "they hate you very much and dread the havoc you would certainly bring upon this realm. And so they have passed a law saying you shall never be Queen of England! They have dismissed you from the line of succession!"

The Queen of Scots was silent. She stood like a stone. "But the Queen of England is dead?" she asked at last.

"Oh, no. Her Majesty is much, much better – for which we all give grateful thanks."

The Queen of Scots murmured a prayer – she scarcely knew what. "But the pink carnations?" she said.

"Her Majesty was most disappointed in your present," said the Countess. "The embroidery came all unravelled." She cast a contemptuous look at the Queen of Scots' lady-in-waiting. "It is my belief that Mrs Seton did not knot and tie the threads properly."

Henceforth the Queen of Scots and the Countess of Shrewsbury were no longer friends.

That night in her chamber when the Queen lay in bed, it seemed to her that the curtains of her bed were parted by a breath of wind. In the light of the moon the bare winter branches appeared to her now like great, black stitches sewn across the window – like stitches sewn across the castle, across the Queen herself. In her terror she thought her eyes were stitched up, her throat was closed with black stitches; her fingers were sewn together so that her hands were become useless, ugly flaps.

She screamed and all her attendants came running. "Elle m'a cousue à mon lit! Elle m'a cousue à mon lit!"cried the Queen. (She has sewn me to the bed! She has sewn me to the bed!) They calmed her and showed her that the Countess had done no such thing.

But the Queen never again tried to steal the Earl's affections away from the Countess.

A year or so later the Earl moved the Queen from one of his own castles to the Countess's new house of Chatsworth. When they arrived the Earl smilingly showed her a new floor which his wife had caused to have laid in the hallway – a chequerboard of black and white marble.

The Queen shivered, remembering the boy who had died wailing that the black squares and the white were killing him.

"I will not walk across it," said the Queen.

The Earl looked as if he did not understand. When it was revealed that all the entrances to the house had black and white squares to their floors, the Queen said she would not go in. The poor Earl tore out his hair and beard (which was by this time completely white and rather wispy), and begged, but the Queen declined absolutely to walk across the chequering. They brought a chair for her in the porch and she went and sat upon it. The Derbyshire rain came down and the Queen waited until the Earl brought workmen to dig up the squares of black and white marble.

"But why?" the Earl asked the Queen's servants. They shrugged their French and Scottish shoulders and made him no answer.

The Queen had not known a life could be so blank. She passed the years in devising plans to gain this European throne or that, intriguing to marry this great nobleman or that, but nothing ever came of any of it; and all the while she thought she could hear the snip, snip, snip of Elizabeth and her advisers cutting the threads of all her actions and the stitch, stitch, stitch of the Countess sewing her into the fabric of England, her prison.

One evening she was staring vacantly at an embroidered hanging. It showed some catastrophe befalling a classical lady. Her eye was caught by one of the classical lady's attendants who was depicted running away from the dreadful scene in alarm. A breath of wind within the chamber kept bringing the hanging dangerously close to a candle that stood upon a coffer. It was almost as if the little embroidered figure desired to rush into the flames. "She is tired," thought the Queen. "Tired of being sewn into this picture of powerlessness and despair."

The Queen rose from her chair and, unseen by any of her attendants, moved the candlestick a fraction closer to the hanging. The next time the wind blew, the hanging caught the flame.

The moment they observed the fire the Queen's women all cried out in alarm and the gentlemen began to issue instructions to one another. They pleaded with the Queen to leave the apartment, to hurry from the danger. But the Queen stood like a statue of alabaster. She kept her eyes upon the embroidered figure and saw it consumed by the fire. "See!" she murmured to her women. "Now she is free."

The next day she said to her maid, "I have it now. Get me crimson velvet. Make it the reddest that ever there was. Get me silks as bloody as the dawn." In the weeks that followed, the Queen sat hour after hour at the window. In her lap was the crimson velvet and she sewed it in silks as bloody as the dawn.

And when her ladies asked her what she was doing, she replied with a smile that she was embroidering beautiful flames. "Beautiful flames," she said, "can destroy so many things -prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast."

Two months later the Queen of Scots was arrested on a charge of treason. Some of her letters had been discovered in a keg of ale belonging to a brewer who had delivered beer to the house. She was tried and condemned to be beheaded. On the morning of her execution, she approached the scaffold where lay the axe and the block. She was dressed in a black gown with a floor-length veil of white linen. When her outer garments were removed there was the petticoat of crimson velvet with the bright embroidered flames dancing upon it. The Queen smiled.

The Countess of Shrewbury lived on for twenty years more. She built many beautiful houses and embroidered hangings for them with pictures of Penelope and Lucretia. She herself was as discreet as Penelope and as respected as Lucretia. In the centuries that followed, her children and her children's children became Earls and Dukes. They governed England and lived in the fairest houses in the most beautiful landscapes. Many of them are there still.

Antickes are grotesque figures. Frets are formal Renaissance devices. Both are used in sixteenth-century embroidery.