October, 1601
‘A toast,’ said Martin proudly, ‘to my son, Richard Chancellor, the Bretford heir, and to his mother,’ and he waved his goblet towards Kate, who sat in the great chair at the top of the table, his child in her arms—a sight which he had long hoped to see.
Kate’s morning sickness had not lasted very long, and her baby’s birth had been an easy one. Richard was a month old, and this was the first time he had been taken into company. His grandfather was seated beside him, a look of pride on his old face. He had been determined to live until his son’s heir was born, and had succeeded so well that he had been able to move to Saxon Hall in London’s suburbs, far away from smelly central London.
‘May I also propose a toast?’ he asked. ‘It is to Her Grace, Queen Elizabeth, to whom we must give thanks for saving us from adventurers both from abroad and at home.’
‘Amen,’ said the company with one voice. They were all remembering the earlier part of the year of Richard’s birth, when Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, had tried—and failed—to overthrow the Queen’s government, and Bevis Frampton had suffered a similar fate when he had attacked the Chancellor family at Bretford House.
Now, in this cold October, all was quiet again, although both at home and in the court, change was in the air. Bretford House was being rebuilt and refurnished after its years of neglect under Martin’s father. Webster had recently learned that a distant cousin of his father’s had died and that he was now heir to the barony which his father had inherited. He was about to return home to help him to run his new estates and to consider beginning another career. Rafe was betrothed to a young lady of good dowry and would succeed to Webster’s post.
Jacko’s new life was the strangest of all. Six weeks ago he had learned with some shock that Kate’s Aunt Jocasta Saville was expecting his child. He was not as surprised as Aunt Jocasta herself, who had thought, or rather hoped, that in her mid-forties she was safely past the age of childbearing.
‘No child of mine will be born a bastard,’ he had declared belligerently to Martin. Without waiting for any man’s permission he had proposed marriage to her and, despite the difference in their station, she had accepted him.
‘For if,’ she declared loudly and often, ‘one of the Brandon family’s great ladies could marry her groom and remain respectable, then I am entitled to marry Jacko, whose status is better than that of a groom, being one of Lord Hadleigh’s right-hand men.’
Martin had been approached by Sir Robert Cecil, through Sir Walter Raleigh, to become one of his right-hand men at court. It could, Cecil had said, lead on to even greater honours. He had refused this offer, as he was later to refuse many others. He had seen what happened to men who came too close to the ultimate seat of power in the court.
He remembered the Earl of Essex’s end. His rebellion having failed, trapped on the roof of his own home, he had drawn his sword and shouted down to his would-be captors that he would kill himself rather than give way to the Queen and Cecil. Whereat Lord Nottingham had threatened to blow the house and all its occupants up, if he, and his companions, did not agree to surrender themselves immediately.
He did so and was tried and executed, privately, on Tower Hill. It was reported that he met his end bravely. Lord Southampton, his most faithful lieutenant, was also sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to imprisonment for life in the Tower of London. The players whom he had bribed to stage Richard II, had been lucky enough to escape punishment because they were thought to be mere pawns in the great game of politics as played out under Elizabeth.
Bevis’s accomplices who had survived the attack were also never brought to book, although, later on, some of them were caught and hanged for other crimes which they had committed. Bevis’s death had been put down as an accident which had occurred in the temporary anarchy of the Essex rebellion. The distant cousin who inherited his meagre estates turned out to be an amiable fellow, every man’s friend—a joke which only Martin and his immediate cohorts properly appreciated.
All was thus set fair at Bretford House and Saxon Hall. The black sheep had come home, to a father who had discovered that his fleece was white after all. Not only that, by using his strength and courage he had been able to overcome an enemy who had dogged the House of Chancellor for many years—and then provide it with the long-wanted heir.
The only fly in the ointment was the Queen’s great age. It was inevitable that her death could not be long delayed and many said that after Essex’s execution she had lost the zest for life which had sustained her for so long. All informed men believed that the next monarch would be James VI of Scotland, but no one seemed to be welcoming with any great enthusiasm the prospect of his becoming James I of England.
Nevertheless on this happy day at Saxon Hall such considerations were far from the minds of the revellers. ‘The first of many,’ Lord Bretford had whispered to his son when he had first been allowed to hold his grandson.
‘But not too many,’ Martin replied, ‘for Kate’s sake,’ having seen what constant childbearing had done to the wives of some of his friends.
‘But enough,’ said Lord Bretford, handing the babe back to his father.
To mark the christening, Sir Walter Raleigh had sent a large silver urn and had asked his parents to celebrate the day by filling it with the best sack so that each of the guests could drink a goblet-full from it.
Later, the feast over, the baby in his crib, and the urn emptied Kate and Martin sat alone among the remnants of the feast.
‘You see how wrong you were to worry, my darling,’ she told him. ‘The babe and I are still with you, even though you have declared your love to me these many times: the curse has been lifted.’
‘True,’ he replied, ‘and the proof of your love for me lies in his bed upstairs.’
‘So you have had your share of luck, at last.’
‘And long may we live to enjoy it,’ was his answer to that. ‘My family is my rod and staff and to the devil with kings, queens and courts: they are for other men, not me. My love and mine own acres are enough.’
‘And for me, too,’ was her answer, and thus it was for both of them through the long years to come, and for their children, too.