The Marriage Game Read Online Free Page A

you should wish to remain a maid is not natural.”
    “I am not natural!” she retorted. “I know it.”
    “A husband would share the cares and labors of government,” Cecil persisted, ignoring her. “He would father the heirs who will carry on Your Majesty’s line.”
    “Aye, and relegate me to the nursery!” Elizabeth said, tart. “No, I will not suffer a man to rule me and usurp my power.”
    Cecil sighed. “King Philip may ask for your hand. Feria has been dropping hints.”
    “So I heard. Well, let Philip live in hope.” She thought of those calculating but lustful eyes, that cold character, those full but disdainful lips, and inwardly shuddered. To be certain, he had wanted her. But never, never could she even consider it … Besides, there was the insurmountable obstacle of religion. “We will keep him sweet with promises, William. You must accept, though, that I am determined to be governed by no one.”
    “I am sure that a settlement acceptable to Your Majesty can be arranged,” Cecil said smoothly. Elizabeth left it. He would see that she meant what she said.
    Her new Archbishop of Canterbury—good Matthew Parker, who had been her mother’s chaplain—asked to see her. Cecil had sent him, she suspected—but it seemed that she was wrong.
    “Madam, I bear a most holy charge,” the Archbishop told her. “Your late mother, our sainted Queen Anne, not three days before her arrest sought me out and besought me to look to your welfare should evil befall her.”
    Elizabeth said nothing for a few moments. “She knew, then,” she whispered. “She sensed what was coming.” She could imagine how her mother must have felt. She had been there herself, a prisoner in the Tower, anticipating death. For Anne it had become a reality.
    Parker’s homely face creased in distress. “She knew something was badly amiss, and that her enemies were uniting in an unholy alliance. She feared there would be some move against her. But I doubt she ever envisaged what actually happened, poor lady. She was braver than a lion.”
    “And my father?” She had never been able to bring herself to believe that the father she revered had signed her mother’s death warrant merely so he could marry Jane Seymour.
    “Suborned and wickedly misled,” said Parker firmly.
    “That has been my understanding,” Elizabeth told him, reassured. “He was a great king, but sometimes ill served.”
    “Aye, madam, he was.” The Archbishop paused. “I came to speak more of that charge laid on me by your lady mother. Madam, in looking to your welfare—like a father, as it were—I must advise you that it would be to your safety and comfort to enter the holy estate of matrimony.”
    So Cecil
had
sent him! Elizabeth rounded on him. “Good Parker, I know your worth, but
you
know not of what you speak. Think you, with the examples of my mother and my stepmothers before me, that I can see marriage as a secure and comfortable estate? I have no good reason to believe it!” Her tone was bitter. “Think of my father’s marriages. Some say one was unlawful, some that another was not, and that the child of it is a bastard; some say other, and so they go to and fro, as they favor or mislike. My own mother was falsely accused of adultery, as you well know. There are too many doubts, and so I hesitate to enter into marriage, for I fear the controversy it might engender. How then can it be called a holy estate?”
    Parker looked shocked, but Elizabeth gave him no room to speak. “If I marry,” she went on, “my husband might purpose to carry out some evil wish. My lord, you have had the good fortune never to have been in the Tower—but I have been a prisoner there. I assure you that the prospect of the ax cleaving into my neck was so terrible to me during those anxious days that I even resolved to ask that a French swordsman be sent for, to dispatch me as my mother had been dispatched. I can never forget it. Do you think I could lay myself