Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 1

by Philippa Gregory

  ‘I can’t go to the Tower!’ I am sobbing now, the breath shaken out of me by their big, bouncy strides with me slung between them like a sack. ‘Don’t take me to the Tower, I beg you. Take me to the king, let me plead with him. Please. If he is determined I’ll go to the Tower then, I’ll make a good death then, but I’m not ready yet. I’m only sixteen. I can’t die yet.’

  They don’t say anything, they march up the gangplank to the barge and I give a little wriggle thinking I might throw myself into the water and get away, but they have huge hands and they hold me tightly. They sling me on to the dais at the back of the barge and they all but sit on me to keep me still. They have hold of my hands and my feet, and I am crying now and begging them to take me to the king, and they look away, out over the river, as if they are deaf.

  My uncle and the councillors come on board, looking like men going to their own funeral. ‘My lord duke, hear me!’ I shout, and he shakes his head at me and goes to the front of the barge where he can’t hear or see me.

  I am so afraid now that I can’t stop crying, the tears are pouring down my face and my nose is running and that brute has hold of my hands and I can’t even wipe my face. It is cold where my tears are wet on my cheeks and the disgusting taste of snot is on my lips, and they won’t even let me wipe my nose. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please.’ But nobody listens at all.

  The barge goes quickly downriver, they have caught the tide just right, and the oarsmen feather their blades so they catch the safest part of the current at London Bridge. I glance up, I wish I hadn’t, at once I see the two new heads, two fresh severed heads, Tom Culpepper and Francis Dereham, like damp, soft gargoyles, their eyes wide open and their teeth bared, a seagull struggling to find its footing on Dereham’s dark hair. They have set their heads on the spikes beside the horrible rotting shapes of so many others, and the birds will peck out their eyes and tongues, and poke sharp beaks in their ears to winkle out their brains.

  ‘Please,’ I whisper. I don’t even know what I am begging for now. I just hope that this will stop. I just want it not to be happening. ‘Please, good sirs … please.’

  We go in by the watergate, it rolls up silently as soon as the guards see us coming, and the oarsmen ship their oars and our boat glides into the dock inside the dark shadow of the wall. The Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, is standing at the steps, waiting to greet me as if I were arriving to stay in the royal apartments, as if I were still queen and a pretty new queen at that. The portcullis splashes down behind us as the chains roll it down, and they lift me out of the barge and take both my arms and heave me up the steps, my feet stumbling.

  ‘Good day, Lady Katherine,’ he says, as polite as ever. But I say nothing because I cannot stop sobbing, little gasping sobs that come and go with every breath. I look back and my uncle is standing on the barge, waiting to see me go. He will be out of the watergate like a wherry shooting the rapids the moment his duty is done. He will be desperate that the shadow of the Tower does not fall on him. He will be rushing back to the king to assure him that the Howard family has given up their bad girl. It is me who is going to pay the price for the Howard ambition; not him.

  I scream, ‘Uncle!’ but he just gives a gesture of his hand as if to say, ‘take her away’, and they do. They lead me up the stairs, past the White Tower, and across the green. The workmen are building a platform on the lawn, a little wooden stage standing about three foot high, with broad steps going up to it. Others are fencing off the paths. The men on either side of me walk a little faster and look away, and this makes me absolutely certain that this is my scaffold, and the fence is to hold back the crowd who will come to see me die.

  ‘How many people will come?’ I ask, the little coughing sobs make it hard for me to breathe.

  ‘A couple of hundred,’ the warden says uncomfortably. ‘It is not open to the public. Just to the court. As a favour to you. The king’s own orders.’

  I nod, it is not much of a favour, I think. Ahead the door of the tower opens before us and I go up the narrow stone stairs with one man slightly ahead of me hauling me up and the other pushing from behind. ‘I can walk,’ I say and they let go of my arms but stay close beside me. My room is on the first floor, the large glazed window overlooks the green. There is a fire in the grate, there is a stool by the fire and a table with a Bible, and beyond that there is a bed.

  The men let me go and stand by the door. The warden and I look at each other. ‘Shall you be wanting anything?’ he asks.

  I laugh out loud at this most ridiculous question. ‘Like what?’ I ask.

  He shrugs. ‘Some delicacy, or some spiritual comfort?’

  I shake my head. I don’t even know if there is a God any more, for if Henry is special in the sight of God and he knows God’s will then I suppose God wants me to die, but in private as a special favour. ‘I should like to have the block,’ I say.

  ‘The block, my lady?’

  ‘Yes, the executioner’s block. Can I have it here in my room?’

  ‘If you wish … but … what do you want it for?’

  ‘To practise,’ I say impatiently. I go across to the window and I look down. The green will be filled with people who were proud to be at my court, people who were desperate to be my friend. Now they will be watching me die. If I am to do it, I had better do it properly.

  He gulps. Of course he doesn’t understand what I mean, he is an old man, he will die in his bed with his friends watching his last breath. But I shall be watched by hundreds of critical eyes. I want to do it gracefully if I have to do it.

  ‘I shall have them bring it at once,’ he says. ‘And will you see your confessor now?’

  I nod. Though if God knows everything already, and already has decided that I am so bad that I should die before my seventeenth birthday, it is hard to know what the point of confession might be.

  He bows and goes from the room. The soldiers bow and close the door. The key turns in the lock with a great clunk. I go and look out of the window at the workmen and the scaffold below. It looks as if they will be finished by tonight. Perhaps they will be ready tomorrow.

  It takes two of them to bring in the block with much huffing and puffing as if it were heavy, and many sideways glances at me as if I am rather peculiar in needing to practise. Really, if they had been Queen of England like me, when I was still a girl, then they would know what a comfort it is to get the ceremonies right. There is nothing worse in the whole world than not knowing what you are supposed to do and looking foolish.

  I kneel before the great thing and put my head down on it. I can’t say it’s very comfortable. I try it with my head turned one way and then the other. There’s no vast improvement in either direction, and no change of view anyway as I will be blindfolded, and underneath the blindfold I shall have my eyes tight shut, hoping like a child that it isn’t happening. The wood is smooth, cool under my hot cheek.

  I suppose I really do have to do this.

  I sit back on my heels and look at the damned thing. Really, if it were not so dreadful, I could laugh. All along I thought I had the Boleyn inheritance of grace and beauty and charm, and it turns out that all I have inherited is this: her block. This is the Boleyn inheritance for me. Voilà: the executioner’s block.

  Jane Boleyn, the Tower of London, 13 February 1542

  She is to be beheaded today, already the crowd is gathering on the green. Looking from the window I can see so many faces I know. These are friends and rivals who go back years and years with me, we were children together when Henry VII was on the throne, and some of us were ladies at the court of Queen Katherine of Aragon. I wave merrily and a couple of them see me, and point, and stare.

  Here comes the block now! They have had it tucked away somewhere and two of the workmen heave it up to the scaffold and spread the sawdust around it. That’s to catch her blood. Beneath the scaffold is a basket filled with straw to catch her head. I know all of this, for I have seen it before, more than once. Hen
ry has been a king who has used the headsman very often. I was there at the beheading of Anne Boleyn, I saw her walk up those shallow steps to the scaffold, and stand before the crowd, and confess her sins and pray for her soul. She looked over our heads to the Tower gate, as if she were waiting for the pardon that she had been promised. It never came and she had to kneel down and put her head on the block and stretch out her arms as a signal that the sword could come down. I’ve often wondered what it must be like, to fling your arms out as if you were flying, and the next moment hear that swish and feel the hair on the back of your neck lift with the wind of the passing blade and then …

  Well, Katherine will know soon enough. The door behind me opens and a priest comes in, very grave-looking in his vestments, with a Bible and a prayer book hugged to his chest.

  ‘My child,’ he says. ‘Are you prepared for the hour of your death?’

  I laugh out loud, and then it sounds so convincingly mad that I laugh again. I cannot tell him that he is mistaken and that I cannot be sentenced to die, because I am insane, but I point at him and say, ‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’ very loudly.

  He sighs and kneels down on the floor before me, folds his hands together and closes his eyes. I skip away from him to the far side of the room and say, ‘Hello?’ But he starts the prayers of confession and penitence and pays no attention to me at all. Some fool has told him that I am to be prepared for death, and I suppose I shall have to go along with it since I can hardly argue with him. I suppose at the last moment they will come and commute the sentence to imprisonment. ‘Hello!’ I say again and climb up to the window-ledge.

  There is a stir in the crowd, and everyone is craning to look at the door at the foot of the tower. I stand up on my toes and push my face against the cold glass so that I can see what they are all looking at. It is her: little Kitty Howard, staggering to the scaffold. Her legs seem to have given way, she is being carried between a guard and a woman in waiting, and they half drag her to the steps and then her little wavering feet wander about and they have to bodily lift her and push her up to the stage. I laugh at the incongruity of this, then I catch myself at the horror of laughing at a girl, almost a child, on the way to her death. Then I realise it sounds as if I am mad, and I laugh again for the benefit of the priest, praying for my soul in the room behind me.

  She looks as if she has fainted, they are slapping her face and pinching her cheeks, poor little mite. She stumbles to the front of the stage and clutches the rail and tries to speak. I can’t hear what she says, I doubt anybody can hear much. I can see her lips, it looks as if she is saying: ‘Please’.

  She falls back and they catch her and push her into kneeling before the block, she clings to it, as if it might save her. Even from here I can see she is weeping. Then gently, just as she does at bedtime, as if she were a little girl settling down to sleep, she strokes a lock of her hair away from her face with her hand, and puts her head down on the smooth wood. She turns her little head and lays her cheek on the wood. Tentatively – as if she wishes she didn’t have to do it – she stretches out her trembling hands and the headsman is in a hurry and his axe flashes down like a bolt of lightning.

  I scream at the great gout of blood and the way her head bounces on the platform. The priest behind me falls silent, and I remember that I must not forget my part, not for a moment, and so I call out: ‘Kitty, is that you? Is that you, Kitty? Is it a game?’

  ‘Poor woman,’ the priest says, and gets to his feet. ‘Give me a sign that you have confessed your sins and die in faith, poor witless thing.’

  I jump down from the windowsill for I hear the grate of the key in the lock and now they will come to take me home. They will take me out of the back door and hurry me to the watergate and then, I guess, by unmarked barge, probably to Greenwich and then perhaps by boat to Norwich. ‘Time to go,’ I say merrily.

  ‘God bless her and forgive her,’ the priest says. He holds out his Bible for me to kiss.

  ‘Time to go,’ I say again. I kiss it, since he is so urgent that I should, and I laugh at his sad face.

  The guards stand either side of me and we go quickly down the stairs. But when I expect them to turn away to the back of the tower they guide me to the front entrance, to the green. I check at once, I don’t want to see Katherine Howard’s body being wrapped up like old laundry, then I remember I have to appear mad, right up to the last moment when they put me on the boat, I have to appear so witless that I cannot be beheaded.

  ‘Quick, quick!’ I say. ‘Trot, trot!’

  The guards in reply take my arms and the door is swung open. The court is still assembled, almost as if they are waiting for another show on the bloodstained stage. I don’t like to be taken through them, past my friends who were honoured to know me. In the front row I see my kinsman, the Earl of Surrey, looking a little queasy at the sawdust drenched in his cousin’s blood, but laughing it all off. I laugh too and look from one guard to the other. ‘Trot! Trot!’ I say.

  They grimace as if this is disagreeable and they tighten their grip and we walk towards the scaffold. I hesitate. ‘Not me,’ I say.

  ‘Come along now, Lady Rochford,’ the man on my right says. ‘Come up the steps.’

  ‘No!’ I protest, I dig my heels in, but they are too strong for me. They move me on.

  ‘Come on now, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘You can’t execute me,’ I say. ‘I am a madwoman. You can’t execute a madwoman.’

  ‘We can,’ the man says.

  I twist in their grip, when they march me to the steps I get my feet against the first tread and push off from it, and they have to wrestle to get me up one step. ‘You can’t,’ I say. ‘I am mad. The doctors say I am mad. The king sent his own doctors, his own doctors every day to see that I am mad.’

  ‘Had the law changed, didn’t he?’ one of the guards puffs. Another fellow joins them and is pushing me from behind. His hard hands in my back propel me up the steps to the stage. They are lifting the wrapped body of Katherine off at the front, and her head is in the basket, her beautiful golden-brown hair spilling over the side.

  ‘Not me!’ I insist. ‘I am mad.’

  ‘He changed the law,’ the guard shouts at me over the laughter of the crowd, which has cheered up at this battle to get me up the steps. ‘Changed the law so that anyone convicted of treason could be beheaded, whether mad or not.’

  ‘The doctor, the king’s own doctor, says I’m mad.’

  ‘Makes no difference, you’re still going to die.’

  They hold me at the front of the stage. I look out at the laughing, avid faces. Nobody has ever loved me in this court, nobody will shed a tear for me. Nobody will protest against this new injustice.

  ‘I am not mad,’ I shout. ‘But I am completely innocent. Good people, I beg you to implore the king for mercy. I have done nothing wrong but one terrible thing, one terrible thing. And I was punished for that, you know I was punished for it. Nobody blamed me for it but it was the worst thing a wife could do … I loved him …’ There is a roll of drums which drowns out everything but my own crying. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry for it …’

  They drag me back from the rail at the front of the stage and they force me down into the stained sawdust. They force my hands on to the block, which is wet with her blood. When I look at my hands they are as red with blood as if I am a killer. I will die with innocent blood on my hands.

  ‘I am innocent,’ I shout. They wrestle the blindfold on me so I can see nothing. ‘I am innocent of everything. I have always been innocent of everything. The only thing I ever did, the only sin ever, was against George, for love of George, my husband George, God forgive me for that – I want to confess …’

  ‘On the count of three,’ the guard says. ‘One-two-three.’

  Five years later

  Anne, Hever Castle, January 1547

  So, he is dead at last, my husband who denied me, the man who failed the promise of his youth, the king who turned tyrant, the schol
ar who went mad, the beloved boy who became a monster. It was only his death that saved his last wife, Katherine Parr, who was to be arrested for treason and heresy; but death, which had been his ally, his partner and his pander for so long, finally came for him.

  How many did the king kill? We can start to count now that death has stilled his murderous will. Thousands. No-one will ever know. Up and down the land the burnings in the market place for heresy, the hanging at the gallows for treason. Thousands and thousands of men and women whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. Papists who held to the religion of their fathers, reformers who wanted the new ways. Little Kitty Howard among the dead, whose only crime was that she loved a boy of her own age and not a man old enough to be her father, and rotting from the leg upwards. This is the man they call a great king, the greatest king that we have ever had in England. Does it not teach us that we should have no king? That a people should be free? That a tyrant is still a tyrant even when he has a handsome face under a crown?

  I think of the Boleyn inheritance that meant so much to Lady Rochford. She was the heir, in the end. She inherited the death of her sister-in-law, of her husband. Her inheritance and poor Kitty’s, was death on the scaffold, just like them. I have a share of the Boleyn inheritance too, this pretty little castle set in the Kent countryside, my favourite home.

  So it is over. I shall wear mourning for the king, and then I shall attend the coronation of the prince, the little boy I loved, now to be King Edward. I have become what I promised myself I would be, if I was spared Henry’s axe. I promised myself that I would live my own life, by my own lights, that I would play my part in the world as a woman in my own right; and I have done this.

  I am a free woman now, free from him and finally free from fear. If there is a knock on my door in the night I will not start up from my bed, my heart hammering, thinking that my luck has run out and that he has sent his soldiers for me. If a stranger comes to my house I will not suspect a spy. If someone asks me for news of the court I will not fear entrapment.