by Karen Harper
“The palace can hold out a while,” I shouted, “but Edward must be told they made it here!”
“I have orders to warn the queen! Then I’ll go back. Streets blocked—gotta take a roundabout way.”
“That will take too long. Consider her warned with this noise outside and broken windows. You must go back to Edward and bring him and some men here—attack them from the outside too. I’ve seen it done—years ago in Ireland before my home castle was taken by deceit. He’ll know what to do. Go. Go!”
“He told me to tell the queen first, and then we’ll go, or I’ll send someone else!” he shouted. “His lordship was adamant that the queen be warned while she could still flee!”
“I’ll tell the queen! You get back to my lord with word of this, and tell him to bring troops here, even if it weakens the line of the main onslaught. Now, or I will ride there myself!”
He finally obeyed, muttering something about women captains. I looked out the windows again. Below, the men my lord had left at the palace were holding their own. Could I risk that Edward would be warned and arrive in time with reinforcements? Could I delay telling the queen that all might be lost and she should flee?
But I did not have to go to her, as she, Renard, and six yeomen guards, all trailed by her ladies, came rushing along the corridor to view the fighting below, as if there were some fine joust being played out for them.
“Whatever are we to do?” Mary was saying, wringing her hands with her big crucifix clasped between. “I will not leave my palace and my capital, not to a rabble who want to put my sister on the throne!”
“Your Grace,” I said, rushing up to her and curtsying low, “I can assure you more help is on the way.”
“Assure me how?”
“Not only do I know my husband’s loyalty and zeal to protect you, but I just spoke with one of his lieutenants, who said this splinter group will be dealt with.”
“She lies,” Renard said.
“Gera Clinton’s fault is that she dares to say things she should not,” the queen clipped out. It was, perhaps, the biggest gamble of my life, but then both King Henry and Queen Mary had remarked upon the luck of the Irish. Within a half hour, thank God, before Wyatt’s forces could batter their way into Whitehall, his soldiers were penned in and cut down by my husband’s men. With Wyatt himself taken, the upheaval was over—that is, the military upheaval, for the queen’s blood was now up and she—with thanks to my lord for bringing the extra troops, and her ear unfortunately still tuned to Ambassador Renard—moved with swift vengeance.
Scores of rebels’ bodies swung from gibbets throughout the city. Townsmen who had turned traitor were hanged from their own shop signs, while wives and children cowered and wailed inside. Rebel leaders’ heads on pikes studded London Bridge. Thomas Wyatt himself was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley, whom Mary had once insisted would be spared with Christ’s tender mercy, were beheaded. And Elizabeth Tudor was brought by force to London and imprisoned in a suite at Whitehall and questioned endlessly about her treachery and treason to have secretly spurred on this unholy rebellion.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-EIGHTH
WHITEHALL PALACE
March 18, 1554
“I cannot believe the queen won’t let anyone see Elizabeth,” I complained to Mabel, my arms folded over my chest as I paced in Edward’s and my rooms at court. Though command of the royal navy had been given to a doddering old man, Lord Effingham, at least Edward had been given a commission at sea and captained the Defiance again. He was sailing somewhere south of England right now, when he should be here.
“She’s not only been held as a prisoner,” I went on, “but I just heard the queen is sending her to the Tower! The Tower, where her mother—and my family—met their deaths. Elizabeth has consistently insisted she had naught to do with Wyatt’s rebellion, they can prove nothing but that she had a letter from him, they have no reply from her, but she is being suspected of treason. Treason! The Tudors did always see treason behind every tree!”
“I hear you, Gera, and half the palace will too if you don’t calm down,” Mabel said, looking up from her embroidery of the Fitzgerald crest.
“If I don’t speak up, who will? Besides, I can barely hear myself over the ceaseless rain battering the windows. You shouldn’t be so calm either. Gerald’s title was promised; he fought bravely with Edward during the rebellion, and nothing—not so much as a word about the return of his earldom!”
“I am angry about that. Her Majesty is planning her own wedding, but—stubborn man that Gerald is—certainly so different from you,” she added, her voice dripping sarcasm, “she’s delaying mine.”
“Yes, I’m stubborn. The Fitzgeralds are, so best get used to that.” I stopped pacing so quickly my skirts belled around me. I sighed and went over to the window smeared with rain. The queen had given us fine rooms overlooking the Thames, perhaps a nod to Edward’s love of the sea. Saint Brigid, but how I would love to be at sea with him. I’d even help him chase the pirates that dared to interfere with English—and Irish—shipping.
I saw someone was braving the elements on this bleak, wet mid-March day: A six-oared boat, not a royal one, had pulled up to the royal wharf. Someone fully guarded was being taken toward that bobbing boat. I held my breath so I wouldn’t steam up the pane and wiped the inside moisture away.
Elizabeth! I had sensed it was her, known it was her, just as when I had looked down to see her running to a tryst with Tom Seymour years ago. But now she looked slumped and sick, swaying slightly on her feet. Her steps dragged, and her hood barely covered her red head that I could just make out through the wash of rain. She had no female companion, only two cloaked men and six bulky guards—perhaps the oarsmen. I began to pray that, if someone else looked out a palace window, the rain I had been cursing would obscure the fact that I was going with her.
“I’ll feel better if I take a walk,” I told Mabel, and grabbed my warmest cloak.
“Surely not in this downpour.”
I was out the door before she could say another word, swirling the cape around my gown, yanking up the hood, and thudding down the stairs. Poor Elizabeth was going to face the Tower alone and, no doubt, afraid. They said she had been ill, though the Spanish ambassador had told the queen her sister was counterfeiting her aches and pains. Ha! I write now what I could not have admitted years ago: If I had Mary Tudor for a queen and also for a sister, I would have been ill too. She hearkened to the most hateful advice and was becoming more suspicious and vengeful every day. Her father had tortured and murdered those who would not accept him as the head of the English Church. Now Mary planned to do the same to those who would not return to the Catholic Church her father had ruined.
As I rushed outside on that rain-swept Sabbath, the city bells began to clang, summoning the faithful to Mass. As if they tolled her doom, Elizabeth, bedraggled and bereft, walked toward the boat bobbing in the Thames. I immediately recognized her escorts, the old Earl of Sussex and the tall, thin Marquess of Winchester. Elizabeth did not see me: She looked straight ahead. No pomp and circumstance, hardly the center of attention she once admitted she longed to be.
As she was helped into the boat, I rushed down the wharf. The drumming of the rain on the wooden boards and its patter into the river nearly deafened me.
“Halt, there!” Lord Winchester shouted at me. “What’s amiss?”
I could have replied much as to what was amiss, but I said only, “I am sorry I was delayed. I’m going with you, my lords, just to the Tower; then you will return me here. You did not think Her Majesty would send her sister away without at least one woman along, did you?”
There, I thought, I hadn’t exactly lied. I tilted my head and stared down both the marquess and the Earl of Sussex, though I was aware Elizabeth gaped up at me. Both courtiers knew me, so I did not bother to introduce myself.
Winchester looked flustered and Sussex skeptical. I prayed they would not send someone to confirm my
words. “Well, wouldn’t be proper without one woman, milady,” Sussex muttered.
Not risking another word, I climbed unaided into the rocking boat and perched next to Elizabeth, who gladly made room. Once we cast off upriver, she leaned heavily against me, and we held hands, her right with my left. Now I blessed the rattle of rain because it cloaked our words.
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough for daring this,” she told me, a bit hunched over as if she would indeed be sick. I prayed she did not suffer from the mal de mer that dear Magheen did on the sea, for the river was rough.
“I’ve been through so much over the years; what else can they do to me?” I muttered.
“My thoughts for myself exactly, but to the Tower on possible treason charges . . . I am terrified.”
“I know you are innocent.”
“And I know to trust you, because I heard you were once given the opportunity to say I had plotted with Seymour to overthrow my brother. But you declined, because, you said, you knew nothing untoward about him and me. Except you really did.”
“We made a bargain that night on the stairs at Chelsea Manor. Besides, it was John Dudley interrogating me, and he can go to hell.”
“And mayhap did,” she said, and then was sick over the side of the boat.
I took out my damp handkerchief and wiped her face. I put one arm around her shoulders the rest of the way as London slipped past; then the bridge and the Tower itself loomed.
“Your father died here, so I heard,” she said.
Once I would have screamed that her father had killed mine, but I said only, “Yes, Your Grace, sadly so.”
“It’s not Your Grace, just plain Lady Elizabeth again, you know.”
“Not to me.”
“Dear Irish princess,” she whispered, “at this moment I tell you, blood ties aside, you and I are more sisters than Mary and I shall ever be, dispossessed as you and I both have been by the Tudors.”
At that, I marveled so I could not reply. Besides, as we neared London Bridge, the tide and rain combined to make the current in the narrow passage between the arches deeper and faster. I wondered if Mary Tudor had actually thought that Elizabeth might perish here in a so-called accident, much as John Dudley had meant to happen to Mary herself. Skilled bargemen knew just how to shoot the bridge’s supports on the rapids, but a whirlpool swung us around, while Sussex and Winchester shouted at the oarsmen to go on, and they pulled at their oars to right our prow. White as bleached Irish linen, with her eyes pinched closed, Elizabeth leaned against me and clung to my hand. At least she did not see the gruesome rotting heads of executed rebels leering down from the bridge above.
Once we survived that, the bottom of the boat scraped a stony shore. The great iron jaws of a portcullis to the Tower loomed over us.
“No,” Elizabeth said, raising her voice at last to her guardians and guards, “I will not go in this way. Not through what they call Traitor’s Gate, for I am no traitor to my queen or country! ”
“My lady, we have our orders,” Sussex insisted.
She loosed my hand and stood in the boat, bracing her knees against mine. Her white face flushed; her quivering lips tightened. The constable and six warders of the Tower now assembled on the steps, waiting for her to disembark.
“No!” she said again, clenching her fists at her sides, her furious face running with rain. “Never!”
Old Sussex looked frantic. “Queen’s orders, my lady, that you must get out here.”
“Well, then,” she said, “all good subjects obey their queen.” With one heavy touch on my shoulder, she climbed unaided from the boat and leveled one long, thin finger at the men. “Tell her this! Here lands as true a subject, being prisoner unjustly, as ever stepped on these stairs!” She dropped her arms to her sides and stared up into the driving rain. “Before You, O God, I say this, having no other friend but You alone!”
And there, on the top step, she sat. I scrambled out and stood behind her, then realized I must sit in her presence. I sat next to her on the step, still awed at the royal outburst of temper, deeply moved by her defiant stand. Yet it was exactly what, as an Irish princess, I would have done if I had been sent hapless and accused to a prison in old Dublin town.
Elizabeth ignored the pleas of her escorts, and they were quite afraid to physically force her to go in. Soaked to the bone, we both shivered until our teeth chattered. Did she intend to die of catching her death of cold or ague out here? No, I knew and trusted Elizabeth Tudor.
At last, when she realized they were about to carry her, she turned and whispered to me, “I did not mean it about having no other friend but God. I have loved Kat Ashley as the mother I never knew, and I shall not forget my Irish friend. We shall meet again some fairer day and dance a fine jig together,” she concluded, but her voice broke on a sob. She cleared her throat.
Elizabeth of England stood with her feet still in the puddles of rainwater at the edge of the cold Thames. She lifted her drenched skirts and stomped up the steps without a look back.
“I will go in now,” she informed the Tower constable and warders, as if she had never refused. I heard her inquire of the nervous constable, a man we had entertained in our home, “Ah, are all these guards for me, and I just one frail, weak woman?”
I stepped back into the boat and huddled in the rain as I watched her disappear with shoulders back and head held high. The rain ran down my face so fast I could not tell that I was crying.
Evidently the queen never heard what I had done—she never mentioned it, and I told only Edward, weeks later. Or else perhaps Her Majesty said naught because she needed my husband’s goodwill to keep England’s coasts clear of smugglers and pirates. At any rate, she at last—at last!—granted Gerald his earldom on the momentous date of May 13, 1554. We Clintons and Fitzgeralds had a big celebration with a feast and dancing for our whole family; the next day Mabel and I began to plan her wedding.
Only fifteen days later, the twenty-eighth of May, Gerald and Mabel were married. Standing before the altar as a sponsor to them in a church near Westminster, I could not help but be proud of how lovely the old place looked. The crucifix gleamed upon the altar, and I had hired a washerwoman to scrub the very stones under our feet. Which reminded me of my two surreptitious visits to Elizabeth during the three months she spent incarcerated in the Bell Tower within the Tower of London before she was finally released, just nine days before this wedding. I would have loved to have her here as a special guest, but she had been sent, once again, into rural exile.
I bit back a smile—joy for this day but also for recalling that the washerwoman I’d seen in the Tower during Jane Grey’s brief reign had seemed invisible to everyone. So I had gone garbed as such with my red tresses under a cap, hefting a heavy bucket of water and rags, and no one paid me heed. No one but my friend Elizabeth, who actually smiled when she saw it was I the first time. But the last time I went so disguised, we had a bit of a spat.
“I promise you, dear Gera,” she had whispered through the grate in her cell door as I pretended to swab the hall floor, “if you and your lord ever serve in my household, it won’t be scrubbing floors. You have made my day—my week—my month, for I was fearful at first that scaffold standing in the courtyard was for me.”
“It was left over from Jane and Guildford, poor souls.”
“So they finally told me. Be careful, Gera, for the guards may be back soon. But yes, I know how it was for Jane, buffeted about by her parents, and I don’t blame her for what happened. But there’s another who has cheered me here besides you, a friend from my youth, Robert Dudley, still imprisoned here.”
I slopped water on the floor and nearly slipped in it. “John Dudley’s son?” I demanded, forgetting for a moment to keep scrubbing. “But he went to arrest your sister. He—”
“No one understands him. I pray that, like me, he will be freed. He sent me posies once, had to bribe a guard to deliver them to me.” She gave such a windy, heartfelt sigh that I
felt it through the grate.
“Forgive me, Your Grace, but I . . .” I hesitated because I did not want to deflate her joy. I knew young, yearning love, yes. I’d told her that before when she made such a misstep with Tom Seymour. I could not bear to tell her that the Dudleys had joked about Robert getting into her bed.
“But what?” she prompted.
“I’m far too plainspoken, Your Grace, but you do know he is wed?”
“Something else arranged by his father, that is all.”
I also recalled that the Dudley men had joked about marriages being put aside, about divorces. Before I could say worse, I blurted, “I heard he wed her against his father’s wishes because it was a love match.”
“See—you know nothing of it,” she clipped out. “It is not at all like the thing with Seymour.”
“I guess I’d trust the likes of shifty Seymour before I’d fall for a son of John Dudley!”
I could see her only from nose to eyebrows through the grate in her door, but I could tell I’d overstepped. “So, are you saying the sire ruins the son? Not true, Gera, else I’d have an Irish washerwoman I know blamed for being the child of a traitor, and I would never do that.”
“You’d best not, for my father was not a traitor, just judged and executed as one by your father!”
“You’ll not lecture me. I—”
We heard sharp whistling down the corridor. Was someone close enough to overhear us? I had learned that sounds echoed strangely in these labyrinthine corridors. Without another word, I hefted my bucket and moved away, down the stairs and back out into the streets to the livery stable where I’d left my horse. I was saddened that the Tudor temper and the Irish temper had tangled.
I must admit that such disputes between us have happened many a time since over the years, so severely that once, when the throne was finally hers, I was actually committed to the Tower for “plain-speaking to the queen,” though she sent to have me released the very next day. We made up over wine, stuffing ourselves with comfits, and even danced a jig together, our privy jest for when we were alone. Yes, we were friends many years, but too much alike and, especially after Kat Ashley died, Elizabeth of England could brook no woman who gave her bold advice, had a dashing husband—and was a red-haired beauty too.