Chapter 11
I have had little else to do, these final days, but think.
I often think of Philip Sidney, and the question that I know others have spent decades asking about us.
It is the question I suspect will outlive many other details of my life.
Was I his Stella? He never told me directly.
Not in all the years I knew him. He never said whether the woman he wrote of in those sonnets that circulated so widely after his death was truly meant to be me.
I have read enough of his verses to recognize fragments of myself in them - a certain wit and a manner of speaking too specific to belong entirely to invention.
But Sidney always guarded his true feelings carefully.
And he took whatever certainty existed with him when he died at Zutphen.
I choose to believe I was Stella, at least in part.
Some vanity remains in me even now, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But I choose it. Because the alternative, that a man admired me deeply enough to immortalize me in verse and never once let me know it, seems its own quiet tragedy.
It is one more thing lost to the caution our world demanded of anyone who felt too much and dared too little to say so.
I also find myself thinking of what King James said when he learned of my marriage to Charles. I have turned those words over more times than I care to admit. He called me “a fair lady with a black soul,” or so I was told.
I understand why he said it, or why someone believed he did.
I defied his explicit conditions and married against his direct command.
I embarrassed him publicly at a moment when he was still establishing his authority over a court unfamiliar with him.
His anger was probably justified. But, in these final days, I have wondered whether he would have chosen such a phrase for a man who had done precisely what I did.
Charles broke the same conditions I broke.
Charles defied the same command. Yet I suspect that history will remember him as a soldier who married for love, while it remembers me as a woman with a corrupted spirit.
Because that is how our world has always divided its judgments between men and women who commit identical acts.
I do not say this bitterly, though it would be reasonable to feel bitter.
I say it because I have watched this pattern my entire life.
I watched my own mother endure the same imbalance when she married Robert Dudley in secret.
I watched every scandal that touched my family, judged by a different measure depending on which of us it touched.
My brother raised arms against his own queen - an act of outright treason - and paid for it with his head.
I encouraged him toward that same ruin and paid for it with nothing worse than an uncomfortable interrogation.
And yet I do not think history will remember his choice as the graver one.
I think it will remember mine, the woman who loved where she was not permitted to, as the deeper failure.
I think it will remember me more harshly even when his choice was the far more serious crime by any honest reckoning.
Women who love too visibly are called scandalous.
Men who do the same are called passionate, or simply forgiven entirely.
Their affairs are treated as ordinary indulgences rather than moral failures worth remembering.
I loved one man faithfully for over a decade.
I bore his children. I married him the moment the law permitted it, and I understand that history will likely remember this devotion as promiscuity.
They will see me as a woman unable to control her own desires, rather than as the loyal woman I know myself to be.
I wonder, sometimes, how long my name will be remembered at all, and in what terms. Perhaps a few generations from now, someone will read whatever letters and records survive me and decide what to make of a woman who chose love and scandal over compliance.
I cannot control what they will decide. I have never been able to control what anyone decides about me.
Not truly. Not since the day my mother’s disgrace first attached itself to my name before I was old enough to understand what disgrace even meant.
What I can say, in these final honest hours, is that I do not regret the choice that defined my life, whatever it cost me.
I could have remained quietly within my marriage to Robert Rich.
I could have endured his coldness and his disapproval for the length of my natural life.
I could have died respectably, unremarkably, and forgotten the moment my children’s children forgot to mention my name.
Instead, I chose Charles. I chose love - freely given over duty coldly performed.
And I paid for that choice with my reputation, with years of my children’s lives that I cannot recover, and with the constant, exhausting labor of defending a happiness the world seemed determined to punish rather than celebrate.
I would choose it again. I want that known, for whoever eventually reads whatever record remains of this life.
Whatever the cost - and the cost was considerable - I chose the life that felt genuinely like mine rather than the life arranged for me by men who saw a wealthy match and called it sufficient.
I do not know if courage is the right word for what drove me toward that choice, again and again, across decades of scandal and consequence.
But I know cowardice would have been easier.
And I never once managed to make myself that small.
I am tired now. More tired than I have words left to describe.
Whatever the court believed about Lettice Knollys’s daughter, whatever the king believed about a woman with a black soul, I leave this account behind.
I am the one who knows what I actually felt, standing at the center of every choice that made my name synonymous with scandal.
I felt love. I chose it, deliberately, every single time it was offered to me. And I have never, not once, in all these difficult years, truly believed that choosing it was the wrong decision.
Whatever they remember of me now, let them at least remember that.