The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  “I need to rest,” I say. I think that if Ned left shortly after us he will catch up now and I will be able to doze with him in the shade of the trees, and for the first time in our lives we will be able to be together without deception. I will sleep in his arms and wake to his smile.

  “Make sure that someone watches out for my husband, his lordship, on the road,” I caution the commander of our guard.

  “I have sentries posted,” he says. “And he will see your standard from the road.”

  They spread carpets and shawls on the forest floor, and I bundle my riding cape under my head. I lie down and close my eyes, thinking that I will rest for a moment and that soon I will hear the sound of Ned and his guards riding towards us. I smile sleepily, thinking how excited Teddy will be at being on a great courser, riding with his father, outside the walls of the Tower, for the first time in his life. I think of his tight grip on his father’s neck and the tenderness that Ned showed when he held him close.

  And then I sleep. I am so relieved to be out of the plague-stricken city that my worries slide away from me. It is the first sleep that I have had in freedom in two long years, and I think the air is sweeter when it does not blow through bars. I dream of being with Ned and the children in a house that is neither Hanworth nor Pirgo, and I think it is a foreseeing and that we are going to live happily together in our own house, the palace that we said we would build when I am queen. I sleep until Mrs. Farelow, the wet nurse, gently touches my shoulder and wakes me, and I know that it is not a dream, that I am free.

  “We should be getting on,” she says.

  I smile and sit up. “Is Ned here yet?”

  “No,” she says. “Not yet. But it is a little cooler.”

  There are a few scattered clouds over the burning disc of the sun and a cool breeze from off the hills. “Thank God,” I say. I look at the wet nurse. “Did he feed well? Can we go on?”

  “Oh yes, your ladyship,” she says, getting to her feet. “Do you want him?”

  I take my beloved baby boy into my arms and he beams to see me. “I can almost feel that he is heavier than this morning,” I say to her. “He is feeding well.”

  “A proper London trencherman,” she says approvingly.

  The guards bring up the horse, and the commander has to lift me into the saddle. I think that Ned will lift me down at Pirgo—he will surely have caught up with us by then—and I take up the reins and we ride forward.

  It is pearly evening twilight by the time we ride up through the parkland to the big gabled palace of Pirgo. My uncle comes out of the great front door to greet us, his household, servants, retainers, and companions lined up on the steps. It is a welcoming greeting, but he is not smiling; he looks anxious.

  “My lord uncle!” I so hope he has forgiven me for lying to his face; surely, he will see that I could do nothing else.

  He lifts me down from my horse and he kisses me kindly enough, as he always did. I gesture to the wet nurse and to Thomas. “And this is your newest kinsman. His royal brother, the viscount, Lord Beauchamp, is coming behind us with his father. I am surprised they have not joined us, but his horse cast a shoe as we were leaving and they had to come later.”

  He only glances at my baby and then returns his attention to me. “You’d better come inside” is all he says.

  He tucks my hand in his arm and leads me through the great double doors at the front of the house into a grand presence hall. His wife is nowhere to be seen, which is odd, as I would have expected her to greet me. After all, I am a countess, and now the declared heir to the throne of England.

  “Where is Lady Grey?” I ask a little stiffly.

  He looks harassed. “She sends her courtesies and she will come to you later. Come in, come in, your ladyship.”

  He leads me upstairs and through an impressive presence chamber, then a second smaller room, and finally to a privy chamber with a good-sized bedchamber behind it. I know these rooms: they are the second-best rooms. Elizabeth stayed here in a better suite. I think I will insist on the best rooms, but before I can speak, he closes the door and presses me into a chair.

  “What is it?” I ask him. I have a sense of growing dread that I cannot name. He is usually so confident, and yet he looks uncertain as to what he should say. He tends to be pompous, yet now he seems to be at a loss. “My lord uncle, is there something wrong?”

  “Did they tell you that Lord Hertford is coming here?” he asks.

  “Yes, of course. He is riding behind us,” I reply.

  “I don’t think so. I have had word that you are to be housed here alone.”

  “No, no,” I contradict him. “We were to leave the Tower together this morning. He was only delayed because they were shoeing his horse. He is coming behind us and he is bringing Teddy—our son, little Lord Beauchamp. Teddy insisted on riding with his father. He will take him up before him on his saddlebow. I expect they are taking so long because Teddy wants to hold the reins.”

  Again, he hesitates, and then he takes both my hands in a cold grip and says: “My dear Katherine, I am deeply sorry to tell you that your troubles are not over. You are not released, and Lord Hertford is not free either. You are not to be housed together. He is being taken to Hanworth, where his lady mother will be responsible for his imprisonment, and you have been sent here, where I have been ordered to keep you a prisoner.”

  I am so astounded by this that I can say nothing. I just look at my uncle and I feel my jaw drop open. “No,” I say simply.

  He is unblinking. “I am afraid so.”

  “But she freed me, at everyone’s request, so that I could leave the city because of the plague!”

  Neither of us needs to say who “she” is.

  “No, she did not. She was persuaded by the whole of the court that you could not be left in the Tower in such danger, but she has not pardoned you, nor forgiven you, and she has certainly not freed you. You are to be kept here, by me, as much a prisoner as if you were still in the Tower in the charge of the guards. I have orders that you are to see and communicate with no one but the servants of my household and they are to prevent you from leaving.” He pauses. “Or even going outside.”

  “Uncle, you cannot have agreed to this? To be my jailer?”

  He looks at me helplessly. “Would it have been better to refuse, and leave you to die of the plague in the Tower?”

  “You are imprisoning me? Your own niece?”

  “What else can I do if she orders it? Would it be better if she put me in the Tower with you?”

  “And Ned? My husband?”

  “His mother has promised to keep him within two rooms of her house. He is not pardoned or forgiven either. His own mother is guarding him.”

  “My son!” I say in a rush of panic. “Oh my God! Uncle! Our little boy, Teddy. I let him ride with Ned thinking they were following. Where is Teddy? Is he coming here? Are they sending him here to me?”

  My uncle, pale with his own distress, shakes his head. “He’s to live with his father and grandmother at Hanworth,” he says.

  “Not with me?” I whisper.

  “No.”

  “No!” I scream. I run to the door and wrench at the handle, but as it turns and the door does not open, I know that my own uncle’s servants have already locked me in. I hammer with both my hands on the wooden panels. “Let me out! I must have my son! I must have my son!”

  I spin round and I snatch at my uncle’s arm. He fends me off, his face white.

  “Uncle, you have to make them send Teddy to me,” I gabble at him. “He is not even two years old! He has never been away from me. He’s not like a royal boy who has spent his life with servants: we have never been parted! I am his only companion, I have mothered him night and day. He will die without me! I can’t be parted from him.”

  “You have your baby,” he says feebly.

  “I have two children!” I insist. “I bore two children, I must have two children! You cannot take one from me. You cannot allow h
er to take my son from me! It will be the death of me; it is worse than death to me. I have to have my boy.”

  He presses me down into the wooden chair again. “Be still, be calm. I will write to William Cecil. He remains your friend. The Privy Council are working for your freedom: this might be a matter of only days. Everyone knows that you are the heir by right, by blood, and named so by the Privy Council. Everyone knows that you cannot be kept imprisoned indefinitely.”

  I am silent, and he watches me as I twist round in the seat, hiding from his anxious gaze, and put my face against the wooden back of the chair. “She has taken my husband from me and now she takes my son?” I whisper brokenly. “Why would she save me from death, if she makes my life worse than death? I have to be with my boy. He’s only little—he’s not yet two years old. He has to be with me. I have to have him with me. How will he manage without me? Who will put him to bed?”

  I raise my head and I look at my uncle’s face, twisted with his distress.

  “Oh God,” I exclaim. “He will think I have abandoned him. He will think that I have left him. His little heart will break. He has to be with me. I cannot live without him. I swear to you, I will die if he is taken from me.”

  “I know,” my uncle says. “Perhaps she will relent. Certainly, she must relent.”

  I raise my head. “This is beyond cruel,” I say. “I would rather have died in the Tower of plague than lose my son.”

  “I know.”

  PIRGO PALACE, ESSEX,

  AUTUMN 1563

  My uncle and I are writing a petition to the queen. He comes to me every day and we make little touches to it. She is a scholar; she likes fine writing. She is not the student that my sister Jane was, but a well-turned phrase will always catch her attention.

  We send a first draft to William Cecil to look over, and it comes back to us with his comments scribbled in the margins, and we rewrite it again. It has to be perfect. It has to convince her that I am truly sorry for marrying without permission. It has to persuade her—without being at all argumentative—that I maintain that I am married to my lord, and that our two babies are legitimate heirs. It has to assure her that—though I am my mother’s heir and the great-granddaughter of Henry VII—I will never challenge Elizabeth during her lifetime, nor claim the throne at her death without her authorization. If it were possible to assure her that she would never lose her looks, never age and never die, we would add a paragraph to swear to that, too.

  I have to somehow convince her that I am the complete opposite of herself. She is so vain she cannot conceive someone to be unlike her. She can only imagine a world in her image. But I am completely different. I let my heart rule my head, while she is always calculating. I have married for love, while she is selling the man she loves into marriage with Mary Queen of Scots. I have two beautiful baby boys, and she is barren. And the biggest difference between us is that I don’t want the throne of England, I don’t even want to be named heir at this price—and it is all she ever wanted since her childhood when she was named bastard and excluded from our direct line of succession, and it is all she cares about now.

  I dare not presume, Most Gracious Sovereign, to crave pardon for my disobedient and rash matching of myself without Your Highness’s consent; I only most humbly sue unto Your Highness to continue your merciful nature towards me. I acknowledge myself a most unworthy creature to feel so much of your gracious favor as I have done. My justly felt misery and continual grief doth teach me daily more and more the greatness of my fault, and your princely pity increaseth my sorrow that I have so forgotten my duty towards Your Majesty. This is my great torment of mind. May it therefore please Your Excellent Majesty to license me to be a most lowly suitor unto Your Highness to extend towards my miserable state Your Majesty’s further favor and accustomed mercy, which upon my knees in all humble wise I crave, with my daily prayers to God to long continue and preserve Your Majesty’s reign over us. From Pirgo the vi of November 1563. Your Majesty’s most humble, bounden, and obedient servant.

  Finally, my uncle and I send the finished petition to Robert Dudley as our friend and the queen’s principal advisor. Oddly, his own fate hangs in the balance, just like mine. He may find himself in the extraordinary position of being the lover of the Queen of England and the husband of the Queen of Scotland; he could be a king consort as his brother nearly was. Only a Dudley could hope for such an outcome to ambition and desire: only an Elizabeth could imagine it.

  What we don’t know is what Queen Mary can imagine. We all have to wait to see if the shame of taking her cousin’s cast-off lover is a price worth paying for being named as heir to the throne of England. We are all waiting to see if Elizabeth can bear to raise Dudley to the position of Earl of Leicester so that he can plausibly marry a royal, and then send him away. We are all waiting to see if the Privy Council will demand that Elizabeth names me as heir, as she promised them she would follow their advice. Robert Dudley promises to put our petition when the time is right, when she is ready to listen. We all know that only Robert Dudley can summon the queen’s agreeable mood, only Robert Dudley can seduce her into happiness; but is he so potent that he can prevail upon her to be generous? Can he make Elizabeth—the Supreme Governor of the Church—forgive like a Christian?

  He cannot. This is perhaps the first thing that she has ever refused him. We all thought that she could not resist him, that she could refuse him nothing. But this small thing, this sensible, kindly, commonsense act of pardon, is beyond her. She knows that I am breaking my heart, parted from my husband and my son, kept in isolation in my uncle’s house, forced to depend on him to pay for my food and for my clothes. My baby is imprisoned with me for no fault of his own, my little son torn from me, and my husband held prisoner by his own mother. Elizabeth knows that this is cruelty to two noble families, and an offense against the laws of the land and justice. She should release us—we are no threat to her and want nothing but to love each other and be together—and she will not do it.

  It seems that I will live and die in prison for the crime of marrying my lover, because Elizabeth Tudor could not marry hers. This is jealousy taken to an extraordinary degree. This is fatal malice, and when I receive her refusal, I fear that only death will release me. Like all Tudors she invokes death. Her sister killed my sister. She will kill me. This can only end in death: mine or hers.

  BOOK III

  MARY

  WINDSOR CASTLE,

  AUTUMN 1563

  Elizabeth, merry as a blackbird in a rose hip hedge, rides early in the morning, and all her ladies have to go with her, merry or not, like it or not. I am high on a big hunter and I ride without fear as I have done since I was a tiny child at Bradgate. My father always put me on a full-sized horse and told me that if I held the reins firmly, and made sure that the horse knew who was in command, it would not matter if I sat a little askew in the saddle because of the twist in my spine, and if I spoke clearly and firmly, then it would not matter that I am light and small. He told me that I can have a great presence even though I am of little height.

  While Jane, my oldest sister, wanted to stay indoors with her books, and Katherine always wanted to play with her menagerie of little animals in the garden or in her room, I was always in the stables, standing on an upturned pail to groom the big horses, or clambering up the mounting block to sit bareback on their warm broad backs.

  “You can’t let something like being born small and a bit twisty stand in your way,” my father would say to me. “We’re none of us perfect, and you’re marred no worse than King Richard III, and he rode out in half a dozen battles and was killed in a cavalry charge—nobody ever told him he couldn’t ride.”

  “But he was a very bad man,” I observe with the stern judgment of a seven-year-old.

  “Very bad,” my father agrees. “But that was his soul, not his body. You can be a good woman with a body that is a little short and a spine that is out of true. You can learn to stand straight as a yeoman of the guard, an
d you can be a beautiful little woman. If you never marry, then you can be a good sister to Jane and Katherine, and a good aunt to their children. But I don’t see why you shouldn’t marry and make a good marriage when your time comes. Your birth is as good as any woman in the kingdom, better than everyone but the king’s children. Truth be told, it doesn’t matter if your spine is out of true, if your heart is not.”

  I am glad of his faith in me, and that he taught me to ride as well as anyone. He was the first to set me the task of standing straight and tall, and I have trained myself to do so. I have long days in the saddle behind Elizabeth and her ridiculous master of horse, and nobody ever thinks to see if I am keeping up or if I am tired. I ride as far and as fast as any lady of the court, and I am braver than most of them. I never slump in the saddle or grimace when my back is aching at the end of a long day. I never look to Robert Dudley as a hint that he might turn Her Majesty for home. I never expect any help from either of them, and so I am never disappointed.

  It is not the riding that wearies me, but God knows I am tired to death of Elizabeth, and when we clatter over the cobbles at the great gate of Windsor Castle and the sergeant porter, Thomas Keyes, looks up at me with his concerned brown gaze, I nod to him with a little smile to tell him that I am exhausted only by this queen, not saddlesore but heartsore.

  For all this happy time as the heat of summer goes on into autumn, while Elizabeth is spending her mornings at the hunt, and her middays at picnics and boating on the river, her evenings with plays and dancings and disguisings, my sister is imprisoned by our uncle, confined to three rooms with her baby, torn from her beloved son, and stolen from her husband.

  Nothing troubles our royal cousin! Everything gives Elizabeth pleasure. She revels in the warm weather while London swelters and the plague spreads across the kingdom. Every village on every road out of London has a cottage with a cross on the door and people dying inside. Every riverside house along the Thames has its watergate locked and barred so that no barges from London can enter. Every city in the kingdom is digging a plague pit for the bodies, and every church praying that the plague passes over their congregation. Every healthy house bars its doors to travelers, everyone is fearfully hard-hearted. But none of this troubles Elizabeth. She flirts with Dudley in the heat of the day and slips through to his bedroom any night that she pleases, while my sister cries herself to sleep and dreams of freedom.