For two months Elizabeth's imprisonment lasted, though the extreme strictness with which she was kept was afterwards relaxed, and she was suffered to walk in a little garden under a strong escort, and to receive flowers from the children belonging to the servants about the Tower, with whom she had made friends. At first she had, like Courtenay, constantly to undergo examinations as to her guilt, but she somehow managed to gain over the earl of Arundel, hitherto one of her most bitter enemies, and henceforth she had no warmer partisan. She seems to have answered the questions put to her with her usual cleverness, as the Spanish ambassador writes that though 'they had enough matter against Courtenay to make his punishment certain, they had not yet been able to obtain matter sufficient for Elizabeth's conviction,' partly owing to the fact that several witnesses were in hiding. It was in May that the queen sent an unexpected summons to Elizabeth that she was to join her at Richmond, where she was passing the Whitsun holidays; and how beautiful the flowers and trees must have looked in the eyes of the prisoner, accustomed for so many weeks to nothing but the walls of the Tower, with the bitter memories they contained! She did not stay there long, however, for the queen, irritated at Elizabeth's firm refusal to marry the prince of Savoy, sent her in a few days to the castle of Woodstock, with sir Henry Bedingfield as her gaoler. On the road, according to the old chroniclers, she more than once tried her favourite trick of gaining time by delaying her arrival. At one place where she was to spend the night she was anxious to have a match at chess with her host, and another day she declared that her clothes and hair had suffered so much from a storm that she must positively enter a house they were passing in order to set them straight. But Bedingfield was not easy to dupe, and politely insisted on continuing their way. 'Whenever I have a prisoner who requires to be safely and straitly kept, I shall send him to you,' she said, laughing, when four years after he attended her first Court as queen. --------------------- At Woodstock Elizabeth remained till 1555, writing sad poems about her captivity and doing large pieces of needlework; but towards Christmas a welcome change was in store for her, as Mary, who had been married in July to Philip of Spain, now sent for her to Hampton Court.