The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  “Lady Hertford,” I hiss, claiming my married title with what might be my last breath. “I am the wife of the Earl of Hertford.”

  Roughly, she pushes me to my hands and knees and, like a laboring mare, I groan and push as she commands and rest as she orders, and then I feel the strangest sensation, a slither and a wriggle, and she says: “God bless you and help you, you have a boy.”

  My baby, Viscount Beauchamp, is to be called Edward for his father and his forefathers. He can trace his line back to Edward III and beyond. Royal on both sides, his birth should be greeted with celebrations, with the salute of cannon and announcements all around Christendom, but they put me into my bed, and tuck him in beside me, and nobody even visits. They take him to be baptized in the chapel of the Tower, and my poor little boy is christened in the font that stands over the tombs of his family. It is as if the mortuary of traitors at the Tower of London is our family chapel. His aunt is buried below the font, and his grandfather Grey. His grandfather Seymour is buried there, too. He is not even baptized by a minister, but by Sir Edward, the lieutenant of the Tower, his jailer, because the godforsaken Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Elizabeth, will not allow an ordained minister into the prison to bless the soul of her newborn cousin. This makes me cry. This is so low. She is so low. To forbid a priest to bless an innocent baby. She is below lowness.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  WINTER 1561–62

  I cannot be unhappy with my baby cooing in his cradle and smiling when he sees me. He is more amusing than any pet; he is quite enchanting. Even Mr. Nozzle sees that a prince has come among us, and serves him with the same delighted surprise that my ladies show when they run to fetch a scrap of cloth to lay on my shoulder when he gives a little belch after his feed, or hold his waving hands and tiny plump feet when I unstrap his swaddling bands.

  I feed him myself, as though I were a peasant girl, and I laugh to think that Elizabeth, in her tyranny, has given me the greatest joy I have ever known. If I had given birth to the little viscount in a royal palace, where his birth merits, he would have been out of my hands the moment he was born, and I should have lived apart from him. He would have been kept in a royal nursery and I should have been with the court—wherever it happened to be, even if I had to be away from him for weeks. He would have been raised to be a stranger to me and his first smile would have been to his wet nurse. But since I am imprisoned and he—as innocent as me—is incarcerated too, we are like little birds in a cage, singing and preening together, as happy as my linnets.

  He nestles against me at night, he sleeps in my arms. I learn to wake and listen to his quiet rapid breathing. Sometimes he lies so still that I put my ear to his tiny button nose to convince myself that he is alive and well, and that in the morning he will open his eyes, as blue as speedwell, and smile at me.

  They tell me he is a good baby. Indeed, he never cries. But they tell me that I spoil him, by picking him up as soon as he stirs, by carrying him with me from one room to another, by holding him on my lap when I read or write, putting him to my plump breasts as soon as he pummels his little face into my bodice. The milk springs easily; the love comes, too. This is a happiness that I never dreamed could be. I did not know that it was possible to love a child so much that his birth is a delight and his life is a miracle, and nothing, nothing will ever make me regret him.

  We call him Teddy. I put a blue ribbon from my window every morning so that his father, when he looks down from his own window, shall see that his son is well. I wish he could see what a handsome boy he is going to be. I wish he could see how the two of us, just as Janey promised, have made a baby of exquisite beauty. He has my fair hair and dainty features; he has Ned’s long lean body. He is fit to be a prince. Of course, he is a prince. He is Elizabeth’s heir and the next in line for the throne of England, whether she acknowledges him or not.

  There were no Christmas gifts for this little boy from the court that he will command. Only Mary visits me, bringing a little music box that I recognize from the great receiving room at Hampton Court.

  “I stole it,” she says frankly, winding it up and setting it before Teddy, who pays no attention at all.

  “Mary!”

  “I don’t consider her to be the owner of the royal treasures,” she says bluntly. “They’re more yours than hers. If you are to be overlooked as the heir for having a child out of wedlock, why should I serve a queen that everyone knows is a Dudley whore? Born of the Boleyn whore?”

  At once, I glance to the door, but there is no waiting spy today.

  “Exactly, nobody has come with me but Thomas Keyes, the sergeant porter, who was good enough to walk with me. He’s waiting downstairs.”

  “He’s not listening?” I ask nervously.

  “He does not spy on me. He is a true friend,” she says. She climbs up into one of the tatty chairs and shakes her head. “It’s all changed again. There’s no spy on me. They don’t care what you say anymore. They accept that you acted in love and there is no plot to discover. They’ve given up questioning and they have released all the prisoners but you and Ned.”

  I am so pleased, I clasp my hands together. “They accept my marriage? We are to be released?”

  “No, I think the plan is to deny it, and shame you.”

  The disappointment is no surprise. I think I had known this was coming when they changed the questioning last year. But with a son in my arms and my husband under the same roof, I hardly care what people say about me. I know the truth, and I know what Ned is to me and I to him, and God knows. Who cares what Elizabeth says? As soon as we are free we can remarry and who will care then?

  “Will they deny our marriage and then will she let us go?”

  Neither of us needs to say who “she” is. Elizabeth has become a monster in my mind. One Tudor queen took my sister; the other will take my good name.

  Mary makes a little gesture with her hand that says maybe yes, maybe no. “She’d do anything to keep you locked up, but she’s running out of reasons. They reported the interrogations of the Seymours and of Aunt Bess, and of you and Ned, to the Privy Council, and it was obvious that the two of you married secretly for love. They looked for the minister who married you but couldn’t find him. I don’t think they looked very hard. But anyway, you had exchanged vows and you have a ring. It’s a private marriage. Elizabeth’s mother had little more. The Privy Council have waited for days for her to invent some crime, or make up a law that she can claim that you have broken, but she says nothing.”

  “Why doesn’t she speak?”

  Mary’s pretty face is twisted with malicious giggles. “Because she’s afraid,” she whispers. “Terrified. Half the country would prefer Mary Queen of Scots as Queen of England because they’re papists, and the other half, the Protestant half, would prefer you now that you’re married to an Englishman and have a son and heir. Nobody really wants her, a barren queen, especially one who is in love with a wife murderer.”

  I give a little gasp at Mary’s bitter description of Elizabeth and her lover, Robert Dudley.

  “Well, they don’t,” she says bluntly. “And who can blame them? There’s no more prosperity for the country than when Mary was on the throne; there’s no greater peace. Now we’re threatened by both France and Spain and our queen won’t marry to get us an ally. Everyone has their own preference for the heir, and all Elizabeth has said is that we can’t inherit because our father was executed for treason, and our cousin Margaret Douglas can’t inherit because her parents weren’t married. That leaves only Mary Queen of Scots, and she won’t name her! What the people want is to know where they are, and who will be the next king, and if she won’t tell them, then they’ll decide for themselves.”

  I glance towards the cradle. “Teddy,” I say simply. “It has to be Teddy. I come after Elizabeth, and Teddy is my son.”

  “Of course,” Mary says. “Everyone knows that. Which is why the Privy Council can’t bring themselves to agree that she can keep
you in prison for nothing. For all they know you’re the mother of the next King of England. D’you remember what it was like as Queen Mary came towards London and all of Jane’s court ran off towards her to tell her they were mistaken?” She laughs harshly. “How very, very sorry they were?”

  “I ran, too,” I tell her. “Or at any rate, my father-in-law and husband did.”

  “Mother ran. Father ran. Everyone begged her pardon. I was dragged along to make my curtsey. That’s what Elizabeth fears. Everyone has to be friends with the heir, it stands to reason. So nobody dares to move against you until they are certain that you will never be the heir, and she won’t say that either.” She puts her head on one side. “Equally, no one dares to speak for you for fear of her bad temper.”

  “She can’t disinherit me,” I say.

  “She doesn’t even dare to try. She speaks against us privately, but she would never bring it before parliament or even before the Privy Council. But Teddy . . .”

  “The only way to disinherit Teddy would be to say that he was a bastard,” I say slowly.

  “Exactly,” Mary says. “So that’s what that evil Tudor witch is going to do next.” She leans over the cradle, as if she would be a good fairy against the evil fairy of the story. “She’s going to try to make out that this innocent boy is a bastard and unfit to inherit. It’s the only way she can deny that he is her heir—declare him a bastard. That from her, who is a bastard known.”

  Mary is quite right. In February when the ice is white on the inside of the window every morning and it is dark for twelve hours every day, Sir Edward taps on the door of my room and comes in with a bow.

  “Your ladyship,” he says, by way of avoiding my maiden or my married name.

  “Sir Edward?”

  “I have come to tell you that you are bidden to Lambeth Palace tomorrow to be questioned by the archbishop himself.”

  “What is he going to ask me?”

  Sir Edward looks embarrassed. “About the pretended marriage,” he says quietly.

  “I don’t know of any pretended marriage,” I say frostily.

  He gestures to the paper in his hand. I see the royal seal and Elizabeth’s own looping signature. “It is called a pretended marriage here,” he says.

  I smile at him, inviting him to see the bitter joke. “It sounds like a very fair inquiry, doesn’t it?” I say.

  He bows his head. “Your husband is to go, too,” he says quietly. “But you are to travel in separate boats and not see each other.”

  “Tell him that I love him,” I say. “And tell him that I will never deny him, our love or our son.”

  “You say your love?” he prompts me.

  “My love and our marriage,” I say wearily. “No one will ever trick me into denying the truth.”

  Matthew Parker—now honored with the archbishopric of Canterbury as his reward for being one of the few churchmen who could bring themselves to support Elizabeth—was among those who put my sister Jane on the throne, but I don’t expect him to favor me and defy the queen now. He married his wife the very moment that clergymen were released from their vows of celibacy, but I don’t expect him to defend my marriage either. He was appointed by Elizabeth and he will never defy her. I won’t find justice in the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, any more than in the Privy Council.

  But the people of London are on my side. As my barge rushes out of the watergate with a swirl of dark river water and starts to beat upstream, I can see people pausing on the banks, peering towards the barge, and then, faintly, I can hear them shouting over the cold gray water.

  The time chosen for my appointment was carefully judged to avoid this. The tide is flowing upstream and the barge goes swiftly with an icy wind behind it, but it is not fast enough to outpace the news that Lady Katherine, the bride of handsome Ned Seymour, is out of the Tower at last and going to Lambeth. By the time the rowers feather their oars to bring us alongside the quay at the palace, everyone on the horse ferry is crowded over to the side nearest my barge, and everyone on the riverbank and quayside is cheering wildly for me.

  I stand up so that they can see me. I wave my hand.

  “My lady, please come this way,” the archbishop’s steward says nervously, but he cannot prevent me smiling to the crowd and acknowledging the shouted blessings.

  “Fear nothing!” someone screams at me.

  “God bless you and your bonny boy!”

  “God save the queen!” someone else shouts, but they don’t say who they mean.

  I wave as if I take the blessing to myself and I go as slowly as I dare into the dark archway of the palace, so that everyone can see that I am a prisoner going in to questioning, that I am young—I am still only twenty-one—that I am beautiful. I am—as I have always been, as I always will be—the rightful heir for Queen of England, sister to the sainted Queen Jane, and now everyone is starting to think this, too.

  LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON,

  WINTER 1562

  I knew Archbishop Parker when he was all but chaplain to Jane’s father-in-law, John Dudley. He and other reformers met constantly to discuss the theology of the reformed Church of England, and Jane was in correspondence with their religious advisors. I daresay he never noticed me, I was so much the unimportant younger sister, but I remember him at Jane’s court when she was proclaimed queen, and I remember him fading away as fast as the others, sliding from the Protestant queen to the papist—despite all his promises. Then I didn’t think much of him as an advisor to a saint, and I don’t think much of him as an archbishop now.

  He has the impertinence to keep me waiting in his privy chamber, and when he comes in, there is a dark-faced clerk with him, who sits down at a table without asking my permission, dips his nib in a pot of ink, and waits to write down everything that I am to say. If I had failed to observe that they sent a discreet barge to fetch me, which flew no standard, if I had overlooked the chilly anteroom, and the cool greeting from my sister’s onetime friend and coreligionist, I would know, from the poised nib of his clerk, that this is not a conversation between a spiritual advisor and a young woman who has had the misfortune to displease a bad-tempered queen. This is an interrogation, and he has been told exactly what to report. His difficulty—though he doesn’t know it yet—is that I am never going to deny my honorable marriage, forswear the man I love, or condemn my child the viscount to a new title of Ned Seymour’s by-blow.

  Archbishop Parker looks at me gravely. “You had better tell me all about this pretended marriage,” he says kindly. “You had better confess to me, child.”

  I take a breath to speak and I see the leap of hope in his face. If he can go back to Elizabeth and tell her that I have confessed to him that I am unmarried, that I was never married, then she will be pleased with him and continue to ignore the half-hidden presence of his own loyal wife, though she hates the idea of a married clergy. If he can tell her that I have a little ailing bastard in the Tower, then she need not feel rushed into marriage and childbed herself. If he can assure her that the reform cause has no son and heir, then she can promise Mary Queen of Scots that the inheritance of England is still unsettled, and dangle before that young woman the prospect of peace and inheritance.

  “I will confess to you,” I say sweetly, and see the clerk dip the nib of his quill pen and wait, hardly breathing. “Though I believe, my lord, that you and my sister Jane agreed that a troubled soul should confess directly to God?” I give him a moment to note that; and then I continue: “However that might be, I confess that I loved a young man of noble birth and that both his mother and mine knew that we were in love and intended to marry. They were going to ask the queen for her permission when my mother died. I confess that we were betrothed before a witness, and then married before a witness, and by a minister, but without the permission of the queen. I confess that we laid together in the married bed and he used me as a wife. I confess that we have a handsome boy baby who is as copper-headed and willful as any Tudor. I confess that I cann
ot understand why I am imprisoned nor why you invite me to confess to you.”

  It’s a robust start to a questioning that goes on all day, and the clerk scribbles page after page as the archbishop takes me through everything I have answered before. Clearly, there is nothing illegal about what we did. Their only hope is that I break down and lie for my freedom. After a day of questioning it is the archbishop who is drawn and pale, and I am flushed and furious. He demands that I lie on oath, and I refuse. More than this, I despise him for trying to force me, a young woman newly risen from childbed, to name my son as a bastard and my husband as a blackguard.

  “We will stop for the day. I must go to pray, and you—madam—should consider your obstinacy,” the archbishop says weakly.

  I give him a little nod of the head, as if I am dismissing him, and I turn for the door. “Yes, do pray,” I recommend to him.

  “I will see you again the day after tomorrow, and I hope then you will give me a true account,” the archbishop says.

  I pause at the door as my guard holds it open for me, and he can hear what I say and repeat it all over London if he wishes. “I have told you the truth today,” I say clearly. “I will tell you the same tomorrow or whenever you ask me. I was married in honor, and my son is Viscount Beauchamp.”

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  WINTER 1562

  By pressing my cheek to the cold glass and colder lead of the window in the lieutenant’s house, I can see the steps leading down from the green to the watergate, and I wait here, with my cheek getting more and more chilled, from dawn till sunrise, when I see the guard come from our front door to take Ned to the barge.

  My love, the only man I will ever love, is between four guards, two leading the way, two following behind as if they think he would escape and leave me and his baby imprisoned. I guessed that they would take him to Archbishop Parker today, the very day after my testimony, and I turn from the window when he has gone, and I go to my Bible and lay my frozen face on it and pray that he is true to me.