Page 9 of A Column of Fire

Swithin looked bewildered. ‘False?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There has been no miscarriage,’ Cecil said solemnly.

Reginald explained: ‘She wants a baby so badly, she convinces herself that she’s expecting when she’s not.’

‘I see,’ said Swithin. ‘Female stupidity.’

Alice Willard gave a contemptuous snort at this remark, but Swithin was oblivious.

Cecil said: ‘We must now face the likelihood that our queen will never give birth to a child.’

Rollo’s mind was awhirl with the consequences. The longed-for child of the ultra-Catholic Queen Mary and the equally devout King of Spain would have been raised strictly Catholic, and could have been relied upon to favour families such as the Fitzgeralds. But if Mary should die without an heir, all bets were off.

Cecil had figured this out long ago, Rollo assumed. Cecil said: ‘The transition to a new monarch is a time of danger for any country.’

Rollo had to suppress a feeling of panic. England could return to Protestantism – and everything the Fitzgerald family had achieved in the last five years could be wiped out.

‘I want to plan for a smooth succession, with no bloodshed,’ Cecil said in a tone of reasonableness. ‘I’m here to speak to you three powerful provincial leaders – the earl of the county, the mayor of Kingsbridge, and the town’s leading merchant – and to ask you to help me.’

He sounded deceptively like a diligent servant making careful plans, but Rollo could already see that he was, in fact, a dangerous revolutionary.

Swithin said: ‘And how would we help you?’

‘By pledging support for my mistress, Elizabeth.’

Swithin said challengingly: ‘You assume that Elizabeth is heir to the throne?’

‘Henry the Eighth left three children,’ Cecil said pedantically, stating the obvious. ‘His son, Edward the Sixth, the boy king, died before he could produce an heir, so Henry’s elder daughter, Mary Tudor, became queen. The logic is inescapable. If Queen Mary dies childless, as King Edward did, the next in line to the throne is clearly Henry’s other daughter, Elizabeth Tudor.’

Rollo decided it was time to speak. This dangerous nonsense could not be allowed to pass unchallenged, and he was the only lawyer in the room. He tried to speak as quietly and as rationally as Cecil but, despite the effort, he could hear the note of alarm in his own voice. ‘Elizabeth is illegitimate!’ he said. ‘Henry was never truly married to her mother. His divorce from his previous wife was disallowed by the Pope.’

Swithin added: ‘Bastards cannot inherit property or titles – everyone knows that.’

Rollo winced. Calling Elizabeth a bastard was unnecessary rudeness to her counsellor. Coarse manners were typical of Swithin, unfortunately. But it was rash, Rollo felt, to antagonize the self-possessed Cecil. The man might be out of favour, but still he had an air of quiet potency.

Cecil overlooked the incivility. ‘The divorce was ratified by the English parliament,’ he said with polite insistence.

Swithin said: ‘I hear she has Protestant leanings.’

That was the heart of it, Rollo thought.

Cecil smiled. ‘She has told me, many times, that if she should become queen, it is her dearest wish that no Englishman should lose his life for the sake of his beliefs.’

Ned Willard spoke up. ‘That’s a good sign,’ he said. ‘No one wants to see more people burned at the stake.’

That was typical of the Willards, Rollo thought: anything for a quiet life.

Earl Swithin was equally irritated by the equivocation. ‘Catholic or Protestant?’ he said. ‘She must be one or the other.’

‘On the contrary,’ Cecil said, ‘her creed is tolerance.’

Swithin was indignant. ‘Tolerance?’ he said scornfully. ‘Of heresy? Blasphemy? Godlessness?’

Swithin’s outrage was justified, in Rollo’s opinion, but it was no substitute for legal argument. The Catholic Church had its own view on who should be the next ruler of England. ‘In the eyes of the world, the true heir to the throne is the other Mary, the queen of the Scots.’

‘Surely not,’ Cecil argued, clearly having expected this. ‘Mary Stuart is no more than the grand-niece of King Henry VIII, whereas Elizabeth Tudor is his daughter.’

‘His illegitimate daughter.’