The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  We make love, and then we doze, and then we wake and are filled once again with desire as if we will never again sleep. I am dizzy with pleasure when I hear, as if from a long way away, a tap on the door and Janey’s voice calling me: “Katherine! We have to go! It’s late.”

  Shocked, Ned looks at me. “It feels like minutes,” he says. “What’s the time?”

  I look to the window. I came here in the cold bright light of a frosty winter dawn and now I can see the yellow of the setting sun. “Ned! Ned! It’s nearly sunset!”

  “Fools that we are,” he says indulgently. “Come up, my countess. I shall have to be your maid.”

  “Hurry,” I say.

  I pull on my clothes and he laces me, laughing at the intricacy of the fastenings. My hair is falling down and I want to wear my wife’s kerchief over it, but he says I cannot; I must keep it with his two rings close to my heart until we are allowed to tell everyone that we are wedded and bedded.

  “I shall wear my rings on a chain around my neck,” I promise him. “I will put them on when I am alone in bed at night and dream that I am with you.”

  He pulls on his breeches. “It will be soon,” he promises me. “I know Robert Dudley takes my side. He will speak for us.”

  “William Cecil does, too,” I say. “He told me so. And Elizabeth will forgive us. How can she not? How can anyone say it is a bad thing to do? Our own mothers gave their permission.”

  “Ned!” Janey calls from behind the door.

  I hand him the key and he opens it. Janey is bright-eyed, laughing. “I fell asleep!” she cries out. “No need to ask what you two were doing. You look as if you had died and gone to heaven.”

  “I did,” Ned says quietly. He puts my cape around my shoulders and we go out through the garden gate and down the little garden to the watergate. The incoming tide laps at the steps that were dry when we came, and Ned shouts for a wherry boat, which turns and comes to us. Ned himself opens the doors for the watergate and then hands me into the boat.

  “Till tomorrow,” he says passionately. “I will see you tomorrow and I won’t sleep tonight for thinking about you and today.”

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “And then every tomorrow for the rest of our lives.”

  I slip into the palace, hopping through the little wicket gate that is set into the enormous double doors, waving an apologetic hand to the queen’s enormously tall sergeant porter, Mr. Thomas Keyes, for not waiting for his ceremonial opening. “I’m late!” I call to him and I see his indulgent smile. Janey trails behind me, her hand to her chest as she catches her breath. I am desperate to change my dress and be in the queen’s rooms when we process to dinner, but then I notice that something is wrong, and I pause and look around me.

  People are not hurrying to dress; nobody is making their way to the queen’s presence chamber. Instead, it seems as if everyone is chattering on every corner, at every window bay.

  For one terrible moment I think they are speaking of me, that everyone knows. I exchange one aghast look with Janey, and then Mary breaks away from a knot of ladies and comes towards me.

  “Where have you been?” she demands.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “It’s the little King of France,” she says. “He’s been ill, terribly ill, and now he is dead.”

  “No!” I say. This is so far from my guilty dash to get into the palace in time for dinner, so discordant with my pleasure-drenched day. I look at Mary and I realize that I simply have not understood what she is saying.

  “What?”

  She shakes my wrist. “Wake up! The King of France has died. So our cousin Mary Queen of France is now dowager queen. It’s not her throne anymore. She doesn’t have the French army behind her. She doesn’t have a little dauphin in the cradle and she’s not the most powerful woman in Christendom. Everything is changed again. She is not Queen of France; she is only Queen of Scotland.”

  I glance at Janey, who is leaning back against a stone pillar, catching her breath.

  “Then I am Elizabeth’s heir without a rival,” I say slowly. “Elizabeth has nothing to fear from Mary now she’s only Queen of Scotland, and Cecil’s treaty excludes her from the throne of England.”

  I see the gleam of ambition in Janey’s eyes and I smile at her.

  “You’re Elizabeth’s heir,” Mary agrees. “There is no other.”

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

  DECEMBER 1560

  I live in a dream. The palace seems to me a wonderland of beauty as they bring in the great boughs of fir trees and pines for the winter season and they light the candles earlier every day. They raise the kissing bough—the woven willow stems twisted with green ribbons and the effigy of a little baby Jesus at the heart of it. They tie it over the door to the presence chamber, and Ned and I manage to meet, as if it is a surprise, under the bough at least twice every day and he takes my hands and kisses me on the lips for the good fellowship of the season. Only he and I know that we are drunk with the scent of each other, that our lips are soft and tender, that each touch is a promise of a later meeting.

  The windowsills are lined with greenery and bright with candles, and the dried oranges give off a sharp perfume, which mingles with the smell of pine sap so I think myself in a winter wood. We practice dances every day, and the dancing master scolds me and says that I must be in love, for my feet are all astray, and everyone laughs, and I laugh, too, for joy. I so want to tell all of them that it is true. I am in love, and I am beloved. Better than that: I am married, I am a wife. I have illuminated the terrible darkness that Jane’s death laid on our family, and I am free from grief and guilt at last. My name is no longer Grey. I am Katherine Seymour, the Countess of Hertford. I am the wife of one of the most handsome and wealthy young men in England, and when we tell everyone of our secret marriage, we will become the leaders of the court, the proclaimed heirs, and everyone will admire us.

  Ned steals me away to Janey’s rooms and we snatch at moments for hurried lovemaking. I don’t care if we have no longer than a minute. I am in such a fever to be held by him that I don’t care if he has me like a girl of Southwark, up against a wall, or if he has no time for anything more than a swift kiss in a darkened corner.

  One day he takes me to a quiet window bay out of the way of the noisy court and says: “I have something for you.”

  “Here?” I ask flirtatiously, and am rewarded by a warm smile.

  “Here,” he says lovingly. “Take this.” Into my hands he puts a parchment document.

  “What is it?” I unfold it and read. It is a deed of gift. I scan it quickly and see that he has given me a fortune in land.

  “It is your dower lands,” he says. “We had no parents or guardians to draw up our marriage contract so I am giving you this now. See your name?”

  He has named me as his dearly beloved wife. I hold the document to my heart. “I shall love it for that alone,” I say. “The land doesn’t matter.”

  “Nothing matters,” he agrees. “Not land nor fortune nor titles. Nothing but us.”

  The court has more news from France. The young dowager queen, my cousin Queen Mary, has gone into deep mourning for her young husband, but it does not save her from being excluded from the royal family of France. She is not to marry the second son, she is not even to stay in France. Elizabeth has no sympathy for her at all, even though our beautiful cousin has lost her mother, and now her young husband is dead. All Elizabeth cares about—all I hear as I stand behind her chair during her low-voiced mutterings with William Cecil—is that if Mary decides to come to Scotland, how will that affect the Scots? Will they rise up against their new queen, as they rose against her mother, or will they take her to their hearts in a rush of sentiment like the savages they are?

  Either way, I have become essential to the safety of England. It has never been clearer that Elizabeth must name me as her heir to parliament, to prevent her cousin Mary from claiming the position. Elizabeth turns to me with a sweeter smile
than usual. She does not want to give anyone any reason to think that Mary Queen of Scots might some day become Mary Queen of England. “A very distant cousin,” she calls her, as if she can rewrite the family tree that shows us as all equal cousins of each other. “And England would never crown a papist queen.”

  Cecil looks as if he is not so sure. “A very good time to determine on your husband,” he points out. “For no doubt Queen Mary will marry again, and you would be sorry to lose a suitor to her.”

  Elizabeth widens her eyes. “Are you saying that Erik of Sweden would prefer Mary to me?” she challenges him. “Do you really think so?”

  It is the most dangerous question in the world. Elizabeth has all the fears of the second-choice child; she has to know that she is everyone’s preference.

  “I am saying that we would not want Mary Queen of Scots to marry a strong power and have him on our doorstep,” Cecil says cleverly. “Not if he was an ally that we wanted for ourselves. We have to make sure that if she comes to Scotland, it is not as a princess of France or Spain or even Sweden. If she does come to Scotland, it would suit us best if it were as a widow without friends.”

  “Is that possible?”

  Cecil shakes his head. “It’s not likely. But you should at least have first choice of the greatest men of Christendom. She should not snap someone up before you, because she was quicker than you to choose.”

  “Perhaps she will not marry again,” Elizabeth observes.

  “Not her! She knows well enough that she has to have an heir for the throne of Scotland,” Cecil says steadily. “She was raised up knowing that she has to do it, whatever her personal preference. She is eighteen, she is said to be healthy and beautiful, so she is likely to be fertile. Every queen knows that she must give her country an heir. It is the duty of a monarch, a God-given duty.”

  “I have an heir,” Elizabeth says, smiling over her shoulder at me. “A young and beautiful heir to a young and beautiful queen.”

  I curtsey and smile back.

  “No one can deny the rightful position of Lady Katherine,” Cecil says with his infinite patience. “But the country would like a boy.”

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

  SPRING 1561

  As the weather gets warmer I can meet my husband out of doors, and every day we walk together in the little patchwork gardens that are dotted around the palace. The birds are so tame here that they sit in the budding branches above our heads and sing as if they were as happy as we are. I put a bell on Ribbon the cat to safeguard the nestlings that will come soon in orchard and hedge and tree.

  Sometimes Ned slips up to my rooms and my servants vanish, leaving us alone. Sometimes Janey walks with me to the little house in Cannon Row and dozes in the sunny presence room while Ned and I spend the whole afternoon in his bed. I cannot think beyond our next meeting; I dream of him when I am asleep. All the day I find I am feeling the silky texture of my linen, the exquisite delicacy of my lace, the shine of my brocade gown, as if the whole world is more intense because of my passion for Ned.

  “It is the same for me,” he tells me as we walk by the river and smell the salt behind the cool wind from the sea. “I am writing more than I have ever done, and with a greater fluency and understanding. It is as if everything is more vivid. The world is brighter, the light more golden.”

  “How glad I am that we are married and don’t have to be like them,” I say, nodding ahead to where the queen and Robert Dudley are dawdling, her hand on his arm as he whispers in her ear. “I could not bear knowing that we would never be together.”

  “I doubt that they are often parted. The whole country is gossiping about her, and now she has told the Earl of Arran that she will not marry him, and everyone knows that Dudley is the reason. I would never see you shamed, as she is. In Europe they say that she is a whore to her master of horse.”

  I shake my head with wifely dismay. “But how terrible if she has to marry without love!” I say. “I would never have married anyone if I had been parted from you.”

  “Nor I,” he whispers. Unseen by anyone he squeezes my hand. “Are you waiting on the queen this evening? May I come to your room before dinner?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. “I dressed her yesterday. I don’t have to attend her today. I’ll leave my door unlocked.”

  The season of Lent comes and is only slightly observed by Elizabeth’s court, which seems to have thrown out the season of fasting with all papist observances. Correctly, we eat no meat, but the kitchen makes a feast out of every sort of fish, and it turns out that fowls and even game are not considered to be meat by the Protestant princess. I don’t know what my sister Jane would have thought of this. I think Jane would have believed that the dietary laws should be strictly obeyed, and for sure she would have known every single one of them, including prohibitions of foods that no one has ever heard of. I so wish that I could ask her.

  Even now, seven years after her death, I find that I want to ask her, or tell her something almost every day. Oddly, I miss her far more than I miss my mother. I can bear the death of my mother because it was expected, because we had time to say good-bye, because—to tell truth—she was not a loving or a kind woman. But Jane’s death was so sudden and unjust, and she was gone from me before I could ask her so many things, and even before I had become the woman I am today. And though she was righteous and fierce in her scholarship and her religion, she was a real sister to me, we were playmates and girls together. I think that I would have become a different sister to her than the spoiled little girl she knew. I think she would have come to like me if we could have grown up together. I lost a sister that day on Tower Green, but I lost our future, too.

  I don’t know what she would think about a husband and wife lying together in Lent, and then it makes me giggle thinking of asking her. Just asking her would be shocking! If only she knew where love had brought me; if only she might have known love herself. “Learn you to die!” makes my heart ache for her, and I want to tell her: “No! No! I have learned to love; and it is like a miracle from another world whereas dying is so earthly.” Without her advice, and easily persuaded by the urgency of desire and my lust for life, I decide to lie with my husband through fast days and holy days alike, Sundays included. I don’t care! I will lie with him through the forty days of Lent and assume that, along with purgatory and with confessors, that sin has gone too.

  “But do you not have your course?” Janey asks me when I tell her of my theological wrestlings with the old teaching of the Church and my own new reformist preference.

  “No,” I say vaguely. “I don’t think I have had it since December.”

  “You haven’t?” She is suddenly attentive.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “But now it is nearly March!” she exclaims.

  “I know, but you haven’t had yours either,” I say. “I know because we had it at the same time, just before Christmas, do you remember?”

  She flaps her hands dismissively. “I am ill! You know I am ill, and I often miss my course. But it hardly matters with me! Obviously, it means nothing. But you are eating well and you are perfectly well and newly married, and now you have missed a course. Katherine! Don’t you see? You might be with child!”

  I look at her, quite aghast. “With child?”

  “How wonderful!” she says. “If it’s a boy, he will be the next King of England! Think of it!”

  “With child?” I repeat, amazed.

  “I have prayed for it, and now I will see it!” she says. “Please God I live long enough!”

  “Why would you not live long enough?” Everything she says only confuses me more. “Surely any baby would be born this year? Or will it be next year? How does one tell?”

  “Oh, who cares? You must tell Ned.”

  “I must,” I say. “Whatever will he say?”

  “He will be delighted,” she says with certainty. “What man would not be delighted that his wife has the heir to the throne in her bell
y?”

  I feel as if everything is going far too fast for me. “I had not thought to have a child so soon, at any rate, not until everyone knew that we were married.”

  “What did you think would happen, bedding him every moment that you can?” She looks at me as if I am a fool, and I feel very foolish.

  “But how does one know it has happened?”

  “You knew what was happening well enough!” Janey’s ribald laugh breaks out.

  I flush. “I knew that we were lovers, of course, but not that it would give me a child at once. My mother only had us three and she lay with my father every night for years.”

  “Praise God that you are fertile then, and not stony ground like all the other Tudors.”

  I am glad of this, but I would rather think of a Tudor heir as something very distant in the future. “We’ll have to tell everyone that we are married,” I say, feeling anxious now. “Everyone will have to know. We’ll have to tell them at once. Before I get fat. When does that happen?”

  “They’ll forgive the secret if you have a boy,” she predicts. “If you can give Elizabeth a Tudor boy, heir to the throne, then you will be forgiven everything. My God, Cecil will be his godfather! What a relief for everyone! A son and heir for Elizabeth. You will be the savior of England.”

  “I must tell Ned,” I say.

  “Tonight,” she says. “Come to my room after dinner, before dancing. I’ll tell him to visit me then. I’ll say that I’m ill and miss dinner.”