The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  “Yes,” the man says. “I’ll get back to Hampton Court and tell my lord that you understand. You’ll hear as soon as there is any more news.”

  “We live in extraordinary times,” Ned says, almost to himself. “Times of wonders.”

  Of course we cannot sleep. We don’t even lie on the bed together and kiss. We can’t eat. We are both of us incapable of doing anything but walking fretfully around the two rooms and looking out of the window into the dark garden in case there is a torch bobbing towards us. I change my gown so that I look my best when the lords come with the crown. I put a cloth over the linnets so that they go to sleep and don’t sing. The dogs are quiet in their box and I put Mr. Nozzle into his cage. Without a presence chamber, without a court, we are as dignified as we can be. I sit in the one good chair and Ned stands behind me. We cannot stop ourselves posing, like actors in a masque, playing the part of majesty even while the messenger may be riding towards us to tell us that the script is ready, the playacting has become real.

  “I will reward the lieutenant of the Tower,” I remark.

  “Not a word,” Ned cautions me. “We are praying for the recovery of the queen, God bless her.”

  “Yes,” I agree. I wonder if it is wrong to outwardly pray for someone and secretly hope that she dies. I wish I could ask Jane: it is just the sort of thing she would know. But really, how can I want Elizabeth to live, when she has been such an enemy to me, and to my innocent son?

  “I am praying for her,” I tell Ned. I think I will pray that she goes directly to heaven, and that there is no purgatory; for if there were, she would never escape.

  We hear the first trill of birdsong, loud in our silent room, and then one by one the songbirds start to call for the day. A thrush sings a ripple of song, loud as a flute. I stir in my seat, and see that Ned is looking out of the window. “It’s dawn,” he says. “I have to go.”

  “With no message!”

  “Any messenger will find me easily enough,” he says wryly. “I’m going nowhere. I will be locked into my cell in the Tower. And if the message comes for you, then they will send for me as soon as they have told you . . .” He trails off. “Remember, if anyone asks, you prayed all night for her health,” he says. “You were here alone.”

  “I will say that. And really, I did.” I cross my fingers behind my back on the half lie. “Will you come tomorrow night?”

  He takes me in his arms. “Without fail. Without fail, beloved. And I will send you any news that I hear. Send your lady-in-waiting to me at dinnertime and I will whisper to her anything that I have heard from Hampton Court.” He opens the door and then hesitates. “Don’t be misled by gossip,” he says. “Don’t leave your room unless the Privy Council themselves come to you. It would be fatal if you were seen to accept the crown, and then Elizabeth recovered.”

  I am so afraid of her that I actually feel a shudder at the thought of making such a mistake and having to face her with a genuine accusation of treason against me. “I won’t! I won’t!” I promise him. I swear to myself that I will never be queen for nine days like my sister. I will be queen for the rest of my life or not at all. I cannot make it happen one way or another. Everything depends on the strength of a sickly woman of nearly thirty years old, fighting one of the most dangerous diseases in the world.

  “And pray for her health,” Ned says. “Make sure that people see you praying for her.”

  We hear the door below open and the guard whisper hoarsely up the stairs: “My lord?”

  “Coming,” Ned replies. He gives me one hungry kiss on the mouth. “Till tonight,” he promises me. “Unless something happens today.”

  I have to wait all day. The lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward, comes to visit me and finds me on my knees before my Bible. “You will have heard that the queen is sick,” he says.

  I get to my feet. “I have been praying for her all day. God bless her and give her strength,” I say.

  “God bless her,” he repeats, but his half-hidden glance towards me shows me that we both know that if she slides from unconsciousness into death then there will be a new Queen of England and the little boy in the cradle will be Edward Prince of Wales.

  “You may like to walk in the garden,” Sir Edward offers.

  I incline my head. “We’ll go now.”

  I cannot sit still, and I may not go anywhere. I cannot concentrate on reading and I don’t dare to daydream. “Lucy, bring Teddy’s ball.”

  I wait and I wait, starting up every time I hear the challenge from the gatehouse and the big gates creak open, but there is no more news from Hampton Court. Elizabeth is locked in a long silent battle for her life, and the Privy Council are trading favors to choose the heir to the throne. Nobody will consent to Elizabeth’s nomination of Robert Dudley for Protector. Dudley himself—with his own father buried in the Tower in the chapel, beheaded for treason—knows that it cannot be, though I swear that his eager ambition, Dudley ambition, must have leapt up when he first heard of it.

  He will be favoring his family’s candidate: Henry Hastings, who married the Dudley girl in the round of weddings that saw Jane and me married off to reinforce Dudley power. Even now, eight years after Jane’s death, the old Dudley plot for the throne rolls on like a great watermill wheel incapable of stopping, that turns one wheel and then another and then the great grinding stone that shakes the whole building. The plot is set in motion, the water flows, the mill wheel turns; but nobody will support Dudley.

  Nobody will openly support Mary Queen of Scots. She is a papist and her kinsmen are making war on Huguenot Protestants and mustering to fight English soldiers in Le Havre. Overnight she has become England’s enemy, and she will never recover her reputation as a ruler who will tolerate our religion. Very few people favor Margaret Douglas. For all that she is of the royal family she is widely known as a papist, imprisoned for the most diabolical of crimes. Nobody would accept such a woman as Queen of England. There is no one else of blood royal and of the reformed religion but me. No one else whose line was named by the king’s will. I shall wear my sister’s crown.

  All day I hear this, like plainsong, in my head, as I play with Teddy in the garden and help him to stand and let him jump on my lap. All day I hear over and over again: “I shall wear my sister’s crown, I shall fulfill her dream. I shall complete the task that Jane started and there will be rejoicing in heaven.”

  At dinnertime I send my lady-in-waiting to wait on my husband. I send a basket of peaches by way of a gift, and she takes them to his dinner table. She comes back to me, her lips compressed as if she is holding in a secret.

  “My lady, I have a message.”

  “What is it?” I hear in my head: I shall wear my sister’s crown, I shall fulfill her dream.

  “My lord said to tell you—thank God—that the queen has recovered. She has come out of her swoon and the spots have broken on her skin. He said God be praised she is better.”

  “God be praised,” I repeat loudly. “Our prayers have been answered. God bless her.”

  I turn and go into the house, leaving Teddy with the maid, though he calls after me and raises his arms to be lifted up. I cannot let anyone see the bitterness in my face. She has recovered, that false kinswoman, that evil queen. She has recovered and I am still here in prison and no one is going to come and set me free. Nobody is coming to crown me today.

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  WINTER 1562

  Elizabeth recovers as if the devil himself was nursing her with satanic tenderness. Jane’s sister-in-law, who was Mary Dudley, nearly dies taking the pox from Elizabeth, and loses her famous beauty. I have no pity for her. It was she who took Jane by barge to Syon on the night that they made her queen. It was an ill-advised journey: and now Jane is dead and Mary will spend the rest of her life hiding her scarred face from the world, as if Dudley ambition has blasted their daughter’s beauty.

  The queen has recovered, but the country is in turmoil. Everyone knows that she was near dea
th and no heir named, and now word is rapidly spreading, from the great houses of London into the streets, that she tried to make a traitor’s son, a traitor’s grandson, into the Protector of the kingdom. Our queen tried to make her lover into a tyrant like Richard III. People are horrified that she would fail in her duty by dying without naming an heir, and then betray her country to a favorite. People speak of other royal favorites and the danger of an unsteady king. Ned gets a stream of messages from his friends and my supporters who are guests at private dinners held in secret by the reformist lords, who swear that an heir must be named to the throne of England, and it must be me.

  “William Cecil is determined that you shall be named as heir,” Ned promises me. “He says that no one has a better claim, either by religion or inheritance, that Elizabeth knows this, that everyone knows this. He says that you must be released. Everyone agrees.”

  “Then why are we still here?” I ask.

  We are seated together in my room, enfolded in the shabby chair that once served as Jane’s throne. We are both half-undressed, warm from the bed, wrapped in a rug before the fire, sated with kissing and touching.

  “I have to say that I’ve been in worse places.” He gathers me closely to him.

  “I would spend every evening of my life with you like this,” I say, “but not under lock and key. Elizabeth has freed Margaret Douglas and her husband, the Earl of Lennox. Why not us?”

  “They’re not freed,” he corrects me. “He’s been released to live with her, but they’re still under arrest. Elizabeth had to let him go to his wife because he cannot bear imprisonment.”

  “I cannot bear imprisonment!” I exclaim. “Perhaps she will let us go to live under house arrest. We could ask for it, if they will not agree to free us completely. I could have my baby under your roof at Hanworth.”

  “When we are freed, I will never come back here again. Only once a year to lay a flower on the tombs of our family,” Ned promises.

  “Not even for my coronation? It is the tradition.”

  “We will make a new tradition,” he says. “I am not having my son inside these walls again.” Gently, he touches my rounded belly. “Neither of them.”

  “I like Windsor Castle best,” I say sleepily.

  “Hampton Court,” Ned rules. “And perhaps we shall build a new castle.”

  “A new palace,” I correct him. “We won’t need a castle. The country will be at peace. We can build beautiful palaces and houses and live as a royal family among our people.”

  “A godly peace at last,” he says.

  “Amen.” I pause for a moment, thinking of a new beautiful palace that we might call Seymour Court. “It will happen, won’t it?” I ask. “For we have had so many hopes and so much trouble.”

  He considers. “Really, I think this time that it has to. She truly has no other credible heir, and this time she has gone too far even for her friends and advisors.”

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  WINTER 1562

  Ned and I have a prisoners’ Christmas with gifts brought in from the city, and green boughs from the governor’s garden. We eat like princes. The people of London leave presents at the gateway of the Tower every day: food and little fairings. I am so touched that they send gifts for Teddy. A London silversmith sends him a spoon with our family crest of angel wings engraved on the handle; a toymaker sends him a wooden hobbyhorse. He is most excited by this, though he does not yet have the skill to walk with it held between his legs. Instead, he pushes it before him wherever he goes and commands me to say “Gee up.” All he can say is “Hee!” and his father complains that his first words should be “À Seymour!”

  We dine alone, each in our own room, but Ned comes to my rooms as soon as the dishes have been cleared from his table and his servants have gone for the night. The guard lets him in and we go to bed for Christmas kisses. There has been no lovemaking since my belly grew big, but I rub my face against his naked chest and he strips me naked so that he can stroke the proud curve of my belly.

  “Does it not hurt the child, strapping so tight?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “I hid Teddy till the last months.”

  “I am so glad to be with you this time.” He buries his face in my warm breasts. “I must be the happiest man ever held in these walls.”

  I chuckle. “No carving in the stone? No counting of the days?”

  “I pray for our release,” he says seriously. “And I think it will come soon. The queen has to call a parliament if she wants money for her army in France. And the parliament will not grant her funds unless she names her successor. They have her trapped. All the lords of the Privy Council have been meeting privately ever since Twelfth Night, and the strongest voices have been raised for you to be named as her heir.”

  I breathe a sigh. “They admit that we are married?”

  “They always knew it,” he assures me. “They just did not dare to deny her before. And in any case, they have made us both swear to our marriage before the Archbishop of Canterbury, who recorded that for the Queen of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury has heard our wedding vows. We could hardly be more married. Nobody can deny it now.”

  I laugh out loud. “I had not thought of that! What fools they are! To entrap themselves when they hoped to catch us.”

  “Fools,” he says with the deep delight of a lover in the arms of his beloved. No one else matters, no one else is of value to the two of us, entwined in bed with the fire flickering on our half-naked bodies: “Fools in a foolish world, exiles from this, our joy.”

  THE TOWER, LONDON,

  SPRING 1563

  Mary comes to see us, bringing me some fresh-baked little breads formed into the shape of men with currant eyes from the royal bakery for Teddy, her arms loaded with little gifts.

  “Heavens, what are these?” I ask her.

  She is laughing, spilling presents on the table. “As I walked through the city people recognized me and gave me things for you. I was all but mobbed. My guard is showing the lieutenant all the things that he carried, to make sure there are not notes among them.”

  “Gifts?” I ask.

  “All sorts of little toys and fairings. The people love you. Everyone shouts out to me that you should be released and allowed to live with your husband. Everyone in England thinks you have done nothing wrong and should be freed. Everyone—I mean really everyone—from the ladies at court to the sluts of Smithfield.”

  “They call for me?”

  “I think they would march for you.”

  We say nothing, looking at each other for a moment. “No marching,” I say quietly. “Anyway—praise God that you did not take the smallpox,” I say, kissing her. It is awkward for me to bend over and she notices it at once.

  “It would be large pox on me,” she remarks. “What’s the matter with you? Have you hurt your back that you are so stiff?”

  I wait till she has hauled herself onto the chair and then I put my finger across her mouth to prevent her crying out. “I am with child,” I whisper in her ear.

  She is wide-eyed in my grip until I release her.

  “My God, how?” she demands.

  I laugh. Mary is always so practical. “Since they found against us, the lieutenant has let Ned come to me most nights,” I say. “We bribe the guards and we spend all night together.”

  “When do you expect the birth?”

  “I am not sure. Soon, I think, within a month or so.”

  She looks anxious. “Katherine, you must keep it secret, for everyone is speaking of you at court. The people who call for you to be free would go mad if they knew you were carrying another baby in here. They would storm the Tower for your release and the guards would throw open the gates. I think Elizabeth will be forced to name you as her heir, recognize your marriage as valid and your son as heir apparent.”

  “Really? I know the lords are advising her to name me . . .”

  “She attended parliament, and in the church service
before the opening the dean himself told her that she must marry, in his sermon! Then both Houses told her, one after another, that she must name her heir. They won’t tolerate a deathbed nomination of Robert Dudley. She has gone too far now. She has lost the loyalty of the lords and the parliament by that mistake. She spoke to the lords in council very fair, and told them that it must be her choice, and they told her flatly that she must marry and make an heir or name one, that they wouldn’t be commanded by her passions.”

  I gasp at her. “They never said that!”

  “I can’t begin to describe the scenes at court. She summoned Henry FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, and he said to her face in front of all of us ladies that if she was going to be ruled by passion, then he and all the lords would prevent it.”

  “He dared to say that to her?”

  “He did. And he wasn’t the only one. Everything is different since her illness. I can’t tell you how much everything is changed. I think she feels that she betrayed herself. Everyone saw how much she loves Dudley. She put him before the good of the kingdom. The lords and her advisors think she has betrayed her country. Nobody trusts her now; nobody believed she would go so far as to name Dudley to rule England. Everyone feels she has shamed herself and let us all down.”

  “What did she say to Henry FitzAlan?”

  “She was so furious, she started to rage and then she burst into tears. You’ve never seen such a thing. We ladies didn’t know what to do. She was speechless with tears, and he just looked at her and bowed and went out and she flung herself into her bedroom and slammed the door as if she was a child in a temper. She didn’t come out for the rest of the day—but she has never sent for him again.”

  I look at Mary. I am quite stunned by this description of Elizabeth becoming a furious child instead of a commanding queen. “My God, she has lost her power,” I say wonderingly. “If FitzAlan can scold her, she has lost her power over her court.”