Chapter 6
I did not know, standing at that funeral among so many genuine mourners, that Sidney’s death would return to touch my life again, years later. And it would do so in a way I could not have predicted.
I did not resent Frances. She had done nothing to me.
She had simply married where duty and opportunity directed her, as I had done myself.
Watching her take her place in my family, I understood how strangely small the world of people like us truly was.
The same handful of names kept returning to each other’s lives, bound together whether love, duty, or simple proximity had arranged it.
***
My brother’s rise at court happened faster than even he seemed prepared for. I watched it unfold with a mixture of pride and quiet apprehension that never fully resolved into either feeling alone.
Robert had become Queen Elizabeth’s favorite by the early 1590s, occupying the position once held by our stepfather, Robert Dudley, before his death.
The queen doted on my brother with an affection that bordered on infatuation.
She showered him with honors, land, and access that few men at court could match.
Watching this favor develop, I knew exactly how precarious it was.
Queen Elizabeth’s affections shifted like weather, and men who rose quickly often fell just as swiftly when they overstepped whatever invisible boundary she alone could perceive.
I worried for Robert even as I benefited from his position.
As his sister, my own standing at court improved considerably.
I used that improved standing to build relationships and cultivate influence that had little to do with romance or beauty and everything to do with political calculation.
I was no longer simply Lady Rich, admired for her wit and appearance.
I had become someone worth courting for my connections, my access, and my ability to carry messages and shape opinions within circles that mattered.
In October 1589, this usefulness took a form more dangerous than anything I had attempted before.
My brother, my husband, and I entered into a secret correspondence with James VI of Scotland.
We promised him our family’s support for his succession to Elizabeth’s throne.
I wrote under an assumed name, a small vanity of concealment that felt, at the time, more like a game than a crime.
Queen Elizabeth had never married or named an heir.
The entire kingdom lived under the shadow of a succession no one was permitted to discuss aloud while she lived.
To speak of who might follow her was, in her eyes, to conjure a rival court before she was even dead.
She had made examples of men who tried. But whatever old King Henry’s will said, everyone with sense understood that James of Scotland held the strongest claim by blood.
When the queen died, England would need someone already prepared to receive the crown rather than fight over it.
Robert Rich understood that and something else besides: Robert Cecil and his faction were almost certainly making their own quiet promises to Scotland. Whoever secured James’s goodwill first would inherit the new reign’s favor. And whoever was remembered as having opposed him would not survive it.
I understood my own reasons too. Queen Elizabeth had spent a decade refusing my mother forgiveness for a marriage that harmed no one but the queen’s pride.
She had also been slow to reward my brother Robert with the service he had genuinely earned.
If loyalty to this queen bought us nothing but patience she never intended to repay, I found I did not mind hedging our family’s future against a kinder one.
I remember one evening at Leez. The household was asleep.
I was composing a letter to James by candlelight with my sister Dorothy standing watch at the door.
I chose every word with care, phrasing loyalty in a way that could be denied if the letter fell into the wrong hands.
The letter was full of hope disguised as pleasantry and ambition wearing the clothes of courtesy.
I even sent James a small portrait of myself.
I saw it as a token of good faith between people who had never met and never would, but were bound by the shared understanding that Queen Elizabeth would not live forever.
“If this is found,” Dorothy whispered, “it will not matter that you meant well.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. But I found genuine satisfaction in the work itself.
I valued being trusted with something that mattered beyond the domestic sphere I had been raised to occupy.
I was good at it. I was skilled at the careful phrasing that conveyed meaning without stating anything too plainly.
I knew how to read between the lines of James’s own cautious responses to understand exactly what he wanted from our family’s support.
Over those years, my brother Robert had come to rely on me for more than correspondence with Scotland.
I became one of his most trusted advisers.
I was someone he consulted on matters of strategy and alliance that he discussed with almost no one else.
He valued my judgment in ways Robert Rich never had, and I found myself occupying a role I had never imagined possible for a woman constrained by marriage and motherhood.
I attended private meetings where Essex’s allies debated their next moves.
I helped draft correspondence meant to secure support among nobles whose loyalty remained uncertain.
I mediated disputes among men whose egos frequently threatened to fracture the careful alliances Robert had built.
I remember one particular quarrel between two of Robert’s closest allies.
They were men whose pride had gotten tangled up in a disagreement over strategy until neither could recall which of them had started it.
Robert wanted to let the argument burn itself out.
He was certain that men of their temperament would tire of their own anger eventually.
I did not share his patience. A faction could not afford two of its strongest voices refusing to sit in the same room together.
I invited both men to Essex House separately, under pretenses that had nothing to do with their quarrel.
I listened to each recount their grievance as though I had heard nothing from the other.
I did not tell either man he was wrong. Instead, I told each what the disagreement was costing him, how it read to other men who were watching, and how little the queen rewarded factions that could not hold themselves together.
Within the month, the two men were speaking civilly again, if not warmly.
“You have a gift for this,” Robert told me once, half in admiration and half in something that looked almost like unease. It was as though he’d only just noticed how much of his own success depended on work he hadn’t done himself.
“Someone has to hold it together while you go looking for swords to draw,” I said. And he laughed, because it was easier than admitting how true it was.
My influence during those years was not romance, court flirtation, or the scandal that would eventually consume so much of how history remembered me.
It was earned through genuine competence rather than inherited beauty, and I valued it more than I valued almost anything else I had built in my adult life.
But I need to be honest about the anxiety that accompanied this influence. Robert possessed genuine talent, charisma, and the queen’s affection. But he also possessed a temper and an ambition that frequently outpaced his judgment.
In the summer of 1598, I heard of a scene at the council board that confirmed every fear I carried.
The queen wished to send our uncle, William Knollys, to govern Ireland.
Robert wanted the post to go elsewhere and pressed his case past the point any councilor should have dared.
When Queen Elizabeth refused him outright, he turned his back on her.
She boxed his ear for it, in front of the whole council.
Robert came to me the same week. He was still white with fury, and he recounted his hand going to the hilt of his sword more than once. “I neither can nor will I put up with such an affront,” he told me. “Not from her, and not from her father before her, had he lived to attempt it.”
“You put your hand on your sword, Robert. In front of the entire council.” I did not raise my voice, though I wanted to. “Do you understand the risk in that?”
“She struck me. Like a child.”
“She is the queen.” I took his hands in mine, forcing him to still them. “You cannot survive her displeasure for that type of behavior. She will not simply forgive you for that type of boldness. She will forgive you only as long as it costs her nothing to do so.”
He did not answer that. I watched him leave my house still simmering with an anger he had not fully spent.
I could not talk him out of a nature that had carried him this far already, though I loved him too much to abandon the effort entirely.
But I recognized, with growing unease, that I could not control the direction his ambition was taking him, no matter how much influence I had built.
The correspondence with James and the political work continued.
My reputation as more than simply a beautiful, scandalous woman continued building among those who understood what I actually contributed to my brother’s cause.
But underneath all of it, I carried a persistent worry that refused to quiet itself.
I had a sense that Robert’s rise, however impressive, rested on foundations less stable than he believed.
I did not yet know how right that worry would prove to be. Or how completely my brother’s ambition would eventually threaten everything I had built, everything I loved, and everything I had risked so much already to protect.