Chapter 3
I learned the truth about Sidney within days of Huntingdon’s announcement, and the truth stung nearly as much as the arranged marriage itself.
I learned that there had been a match once, or something close enough to be called that.
My father had wanted Sidney for me. He had written of it himself in the months before his death, and had asked for it plainly enough that men still living remembered the asking.
It had never become a binding contract. Nor had it ever progressed past hope and correspondence into anything the law would recognize.
But it had been real once, in a way court gossip could never have invented.
Huntingdon told me this himself when I finally dared to ask, his tone carrying the mild impatience of a man explaining something he considered long settled rather than newly painful.
Whatever my father had wanted, he said, had died with my father.
No formal contract had ever been drawn. No agreement bound anyone once Walter Devereux was no longer alive to press for it.
And Huntingdon had never felt obligated to revive an arrangement that had never been more than a dying man’s wish.
I did not tell Huntingdon how this knowledge pained me.
I had spent years believing the speculation about Sidney and me was simply court gossip spun from nothing.
Learning it had once been real and wanted by my own father made the loss of it feel different.
I was not mourning a story the court had built around two people who enjoyed each other’s conversation.
I was mourning something that had actually belonged to me, before it was allowed to simply lapse into nothing.
Nothing about my marriage to Robert Rich had ever lapsed by accident.
Where the Sidney match had been left to die quietly, the Rich match had been building for months through channels I never saw.
Huntingdon worked through Lord Burghley himself, the queen’s most trusted advisor, to secure the queen’s approval for the union.
Robert Rich’s family controlled a fortune vast enough to interest even a man as cautious as Burghley.
My guardian saw in the match exactly what a guardian was supposed to see: security, wealth, and a connection that would protect me regardless of whatever cloud still hung over my mother’s name.
Love had never entered the calculation. Because love was never the point.
I married Robert Rich in March 1581, barely weeks after Huntingdon informed me the decision had already been made.
The wedding itself passed in a blur I’ve never fully recovered from memory.
It was one ceremony among the countless others arranged that season for the benefit of ambitious families rather than the couples themselves.
I remember the weight of the gown, the formality of the vows, and the crowd of witnesses who came to observe rather than celebrate.
I remember looking at Robert Rich as he spoke his own vows and feeling nothing beyond a distant curiosity about the man I had just promised to spend my life beside.
I want to be fair. Robert Rich was not a cruel man. He was simply a man entirely unsuited to me in every way that mattered, and I understood this fully within the first weeks of our marriage.
His fortune was real and considerable. The Rich family held estates and income that made my new position enviable by any practical measure.
I never lacked for material comfort throughout our marriage.
But I discovered quickly that wealth meant little when it came wrapped in the austere Puritan sensibility that governed every corner of Robert’s household.
He disapproved of excess, frivolity, and the very qualities that had made me admired at court in the first place.
My wit, my love of music and dancing, and my ease in conversation struck him as vanity rather than virtue.
He made no secret of his preference for a quieter, more devout wife than the one he had acquired through Huntingdon’s negotiations.
In the early months of our marriage, I tried to adapt to his expectations.
I attended the sermons he favored, moderated my dress, and softened the sharpness he clearly found unbecoming in a woman.
I told myself that marriage required compromise.
I thought that perhaps affection would grow between us given enough time and patience.
I figured that I owed him at least the effort of trying to build something resembling a partnership out of an arrangement neither of us had chosen for ourselves.
Robert made no similar effort in return.
Or if he did, I never felt it. He treated our marriage as a transaction.
He saw his obligations as fulfilled because he provided for my material needs.
In exchange, he expected obedience and discretion.
He showed little interest in my thoughts beyond whether they aligned with his own.
He had very little curiosity about the woman he married beyond her usefulness as a wife and, eventually, as a mother to his children.
I gave him children readily enough. Our marriage functioned as intended on that front.
I bore my first child within the year, and more followed in the seasons after.
Each pregnancy drew me further into the domestic role Robert expected while pulling me further from the court life that had once been the center of my existence.
To be clear, I loved my children fiercely and without reservation.
Whatever unhappiness marked my marriage, it never touched the tenderness I felt toward the children I raised.
But motherhood did not fill the space where affection should have grown between my husband and me.
If anything, the demands of children highlighted how little we understood each other.
It showcased how differently we approached even the basic questions of how a household should run, how children should be raised, and what a wife owed her husband beyond duty and obedience.
Robert wanted quiet compliance. I increasingly wanted something I could not fully name, though I recognized its absence more clearly with each passing year.
The distance between us grew slowly at first, and then more noticeably as the years accumulated.
I remember specific moments that marked the widening gap, though no single incident could account for the whole of it.
There was the evening I attempted to discuss a piece of court gossip that struck me as genuinely amusing, only to watch Robert’s expression close entirely.
His disapproval was evident before I had even finished the story.
Then there was the argument over whether our children should be permitted the kind of education I had received under Huntingdon.
Robert considered an education excessive for daughters and unnecessarily indulgent, even for sons.
I gradually learned to keep certain parts of myself private and to save my wit for conversations Robert would never overhear.
I learned to indulge my love of music and poetry away from his disapproving presence.
I was not being deceptive, exactly. I was simply protecting whatever remained of the woman I had been before marriage folded me into a role that fit poorly, no matter how long I wore it.
In those years, I often thought about what my life might have looked like had Huntingdon actually pursued the Sidney match that court gossip had assumed was inevitable.
I did not romanticize Sidney himself. Not entirely.
I understood well enough that marriage to any man arranged by guardians and fathers might have disappointed me eventually.
But I could not shake the sense that something had been lost in the space between what people believed my future held and what it actually became.
I had expected a life that included intellectual companionship, admiration, and perhaps even affection.
Instead, I had been given Robert Rich and a household that measured worth in scripture and silence.
Sidney himself married elsewhere that same year.
He took Frances Walsingham as his wife in a match that satisfied ambition on both sides, much as my own marriage had.
I heard the news without surprise, though I noted the timing with a bitterness I kept carefully hidden.
We had both been arranged into unions that served our families’ interests rather than our hearts.
Sometimes I wondered whether he felt the same quiet disappointment I carried, or whether he had simply accepted his fate more gracefully than I managed to accept mine.
I did not stop attending court entirely during those early years of marriage, though my appearances grew less frequent as children consumed more of my time.
When I did appear, I noticed how differently people looked at me now.
I was no longer the unmarried beauty whose future remained an open question.
I was a wife whose choices, or lack thereof, had already been settled.
The admiration I once enjoyed took on a different quality.
It was now tinged with something closer to sympathy or perhaps a curiosity about how a woman so celebrated for her wit had ended up bound to a man so thoroughly unsuited to appreciating it.
I began to understand a truth I suspect every woman in my position eventually confronts: my marriage existed to serve interests entirely separate from love.
Wealth married wealth. Ambition married connection.
Whatever affection might grow within such arrangements was considered fortunate rather than necessary.
I had been raised to expect this. I had watched it play out in countless matches among my own relations.
Yet somehow, I had still foolishly believed that my own marriage might prove the exception.
It did not. And once I accepted this and stopped waiting for affection to develop between Robert and me, I began to look at the world differently.
I watched other marriages at court with new attention.
I noted which couples seemed to have found genuine companionship despite arrangements as calculated as my own.
I wondered what those women had done, or been fortunate enough to receive, that I had not.
I do not think I consciously decided to seek elsewhere what my marriage failed to provide.
The realization crept upon me slowly, the way understanding often does.
It was not a single revelation, but an accumulation of small moments that eventually forced a larger truth into focus.
Robert Rich would never be my companion in any sense beyond the legal one.
Whatever warmth or genuine partnership I hoped to find in this life, I would need to seek it beyond the boundaries of a marriage that had never been built to provide it.
I did not yet know who might offer what my marriage could not. But I had begun, quietly and without fully admitting it even to myself, to look.