Chapter 9
She had shaped nearly everything about my existence, directly and indirectly, since before I was old enough to understand her influence.
Her fury toward my mother, her complicated feelings toward me, and her deadly relationship with my brother determined the boundaries within which I had lived my entire adult life.
With her gone, succeeded by James, the same King of Scotland I had once corresponded with under a careful pseudonym, I felt something loosen inside me that I had not realized had been tightened for decades.
I hoped that King James might prove more forgiving toward my family than his predecessor had been.
Despite the considerable risk, my old correspondence with him years before had positioned the Essex faction favorably.
So I allowed myself to imagine that this history might translate into genuine goodwill now that he actually held the throne.
I was not disappointed. Not at first. James restored my brother’s forfeited earldom to his own son, my nephew, not yet a teenager.
In one stroke, he reinstated what Robert’s execution had stripped from the next generation.
I felt something like justice in it, watching a Devereux hold that title again, even if the boy wearing it barely remembered his father’s face.
I was named a Lady of the Bedchamber to the new queen, Anne of Denmark.
And I stood among the women who escorted her formally into London when she first arrived to claim her place beside the king.
I danced, that first Twelfth Night of the new reign, as the nymph Ocyte in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness.
I was painted and costumed before the entire court, and restored to a kind of prominence I had not known since I was a girl fresh from Huntingdon’s household.
Even better, I was admired rather than merely tolerated.
Whatever the old queen’s court had made of me, this one seemed willing to forget, or at least to overlook, my controversies in favor of what I could still offer.
Charles, too, found himself elevated under the new king’s favor.
James created him Earl of Devonshire in 1603.
This honor was in recognition of his military service and political value.
Charles was finally granted a title matching the substance he had always carried quietly beneath his modest bearing.
I felt tremendous pride watching this honor bestowed upon him.
But my pride was tangled with a private, aching wish that our situation might somehow allow me to fully share in his elevated standing, rather than simply witnessing it from the awkward periphery of a woman still legally married to someone else.
That awkward periphery became, over the following two years, increasingly unbearable.
Even as I danced at court and wore the queen’s favor like a second skin, I understood how strange it was to have climbed so high while still lacking the one thing that mattered most to me.
I had lived with Charles openly since Robert Rich cast me out.
I had borne him more children in that time.
I had built a domestic life that resembled marriage in every way except its legal standing.
But without a formal divorce, our children remained illegitimate in the eyes of the law.
Our household existed in a kind of permanent limbo, and I could not offer Charles, or myself, the simple dignity of a properly recognized union after everything we had already sacrificed to be together.
By 1605, I decided that I would pursue divorce regardless of the cost. And the cost would be considerable.
I knew exactly what I stood to lose in the trade: the new queen’s favor, the Bedchamber, and the reputation I had spent two years rebuilding.
All of it was wagered against the chance of finally standing beside Charles as something other than his mistress.
English law offered almost no path toward divorce that a woman could pursue with any dignity left intact.
The only route available required me to admit publicly what everyone already believed privately: that I had committed adultery and that I had broken my marriage vows knowingly and repeatedly.
Whatever sympathy my situation might otherwise have generated would be sacrificed the moment I confirmed, under oath, exactly the accusations that had followed me for over a decade.
I gave that admission anyway. I stood before the court that examined my case and confirmed that I had indeed been unfaithful to Robert Rich and that the children I had borne outside our marriage belonged to Charles Blount rather than to my husband.
I remember the humiliation of that admission.
Not because the truth itself surprised anyone, but because confirming it formally stripped away the last remaining farce that had ever offered me any protection at all.
I had spent years being whispered about.
Now I stood exposed entirely. My own words were the final confirmation of everything the court gossips had speculated for years.
The divorce was granted in November 1605.
When the judgment finally came, I felt relief tangled with exhaustion.
I was exhausted at having spent months painfully reliving every choice that had led me to that courtroom.
And that relief curdled almost immediately into fresh anxiety.
Because, as granted, the divorce permitted only separation.
It did not grant permission for either party to remarry, and it certainly did not address the legitimacy of the children Charles and I had already brought into the world together.
The partial victory meant that Charles and I now faced a choice nearly as fraught as the one that had first brought us together.
We could accept the divorce as it stood, remaining legally separated from former spouses but unable to formalize our union.
We could continue indefinitely in the same uncertain arrangement we had already endured for years.
Or we could marry anyway, defying the explicit terms under which the divorce had been granted.
We could gamble that whatever consequence followed would be survivable given everything we had already weathered together.
“They will not forgive it,” I told Charles on the night we finally decided. “Whatever goodwill remains, this will spend the last of it.”
“I know,” he said. “But I am asking you anyway.”
We chose to marry.
The wedding took place at Wanstead. Quietly, deliberately, and hidden from the wider court that would have condemned it instantly had word spread beforehand.
We held the ceremony on the twenty-sixth of December, 1605, barely a month after the divorce itself had been finalized.
We wed in a small chamber lit by more candles than the season strictly required, as though we could not bear for the room to feel as dim as the circumstances demanded.
William Laud, Charles’s own chaplain, performed the rites in a voice pitched low enough that it seemed to ask the walls themselves to keep our secret.
I wore no bridal finery. I allowed myself nothing that might have marked the day to any servant who glimpsed me afterward.
I remember the strange intimacy of that small gathering.
It was so unlike the grand, crowded wedding I had endured with Robert Rich decades before.
This time, standing before Laud with Charles at my side, I felt something closer to what I imagined marriage was actually meant to provide: a choice made freely by two people who loved each other and genuinely wanted the life they were committing to build together.
“Whatever comes of this,” Charles said quietly once Laud had gone, “I would do it again tomorrow.”
“Ask me again once the king knows,” I said, though I did not mean it as coldly as it sounded, and he understood that well enough to laugh.
I did not allow myself to imagine what would happen once the secret became public. For one evening, I wanted to simply exist as Charles’s wife, without calculating consequences or measuring risk against reward.
The consequences arrived quickly once word reached the king.
We learned by messenger, not by summons, which told me exactly how little the king thought us worth addressing directly. Charles read the letter first, and I watched something in his face go still before he handed it to me without a word.
We were banished from court, effective immediately.
Both of us, by the king’s own order. And beneath the formal language, a courtier who owed us no particular loyalty wrote what the king was said to have muttered privately on hearing of our marriage: That Charles “had gotten himself a fair lady with a black soul.”
Whether the words were true or not, King James received news of our marriage with a fury that exceeded even my most pessimistic expectations.
He had granted the divorce with explicit conditions.
And they were conditions we had knowingly violated.
He took the violation as a direct affront to his authority and a demonstration that we considered our own desires more important than his law.
The king refused to receive either of us in any capacity. He made it clear through every available channel that, even after the initial fury subsided, our marriage would never receive the royal blessing we had hoped.
Charles’s standing, so recently elevated through the earldom that James himself had granted, now existed under a cloud of royal displeasure that threatened to undo whatever goodwill his military service had previously earned.
I thought of the Bedchamber I had occupied so recently and the masque I had danced in before the very king who would never receive me again.
And I marveled at how quickly a court could unmake what it had only just finished building.
In the weeks following our banishment, I understood that we had traded one form of scandal for another.
The secret arrangement we had maintained for over a decade had simply transformed into a different, more public disgrace - one sanctioned by neither church nor crown despite the ceremony we had performed.
We were finally married now, after years of stolen meetings, careful discretion, and children born into legal uncertainty.
But the marriage itself had become its own scandal, one that cost Charles his standing at exactly the moment he had finally achieved the recognition he deserved.
During those difficult weeks, I asked myself more than once whether the marriage had been worth it.
Charles never once suggested regret. He never once implied that banishment and royal fury outweighed the simple fact that we finally belonged to each other in every sense the law could recognize, however grudgingly.
I wanted to believe him. Some nights I did.
Other nights, watching him carry the weight of the king’s displeasure alongside the physical toll that years of military campaigns had already exacted upon his health, I wondered whether we had waited too long and sacrificed too much to enjoy whatever happiness this hard-won marriage was supposed to provide.
We finally had each other, after well over a decade of loving in careful fragments stolen between other obligations. Whatever the cost, we had chosen this together, with full knowledge of what it would take from us.
I did not yet know how little time we would have to discover whether that cost had truly been worth paying.