She heard – worse than any ill news – the howling of the mob outside the Tower, yelling like wolves through the night for Mary as Queen, and death to the rebels. Was it possible that they thought of herself as a rebel?
She stayed at the window listening, trying to pray, until the river glimmered with a cold light, and streaks of white appeared between the clouds downstream; and in that first light of dawn she saw a short dark figure riding out of the Tower gates towards Lambeth Palace. Archbishop Cranmer had also left her.
Archbishop Cranmer, the Arch-Reformer, the exquisite architect of the new religion, who had built it up in phrase after lovely phrase in Edward’s Prayer Book, he too then was recanting. What should she do, what faith could she find anywhere in this world of new ideas that he had helped build, and was now deserting? She sank to her knees by the window and clutched the little wooden image of King Edward. ‘What would you do now, Cousin, what could you do?’
Then it struck her that this was worse than Popery, to take a graven image of the dead for God, and ask help or comfort from it. She must ask help from God alone. She stayed on her knees asking it until she fell asleep.
She woke remembering that Cranmer had left the Tower.
After that it did not seem to matter much that next day nearly everybody who was still in the Tower found it imperative that they should go with Lord Pembroke to Barnard’s Castle to arrange, they said, about the French troops that would soon be coming into England in answer to Duke Dudley’s summons for help.
Lady Throckmorton had to go to a christening as proxy for Queen Jane, who felt far too ill to go herself, though she would have been thankful to leave the Tower even for a few hours.
Her father was still with her. But men kept coming in to speak to him, urgently, privately. At last he went to his daughter and said, ‘I am but one man. What else can I do?’
She did not answer him; he did not wait for any answer. He left her without another word. It was late evening when he returned, and she was sitting at supper alone, except for the attendants who served her, since she still would not allow Guildford at the royal table. Her father came straight up to her without speaking and began to pull down the royal canopy above her head. She exclaimed at what he was doing, and he only answered, ‘Such things are not for you.’
Then he sent the servants away and told her that when he had left her he had summoned all his men who were still left in the Tower and told them to lay down their weapons. He had said to them, as he had said to her, ‘I am but one man,’ and he had led them up on to Tower Hill, and there, leaning over the walls, he had proclaimed Queen Mary. He had then gone on to Barnard’s Castle, and signed the Proclamation. ‘One man,’ he repeated, ‘against them all. What else could I do? Against them, did I say? No, but against all London. The Proclamation for Mary has been read from Paul’s Cross – and London is a howling, dancing, bubbling frenzy; bonfires blazing; gutters running with wine; the people have dragged tables out into the street – they are feasting and drinking, the best way Englishmen know to show their joy. They are shouting “Long life to Queen Mary and death to the rebels!” People are throwing money out of the windows in their madness, and my sweet Lord Pembroke, the turncoat rat, flung away his cap stuck all over aigrettes and diamonds – saw him do it myself! All the belfrys in London are clanging and caterwauling, the din’s so loud it deafens you, there’s not a man dares go to bed in London tonight lest he be dragged out and made to drink Queen Mary’s health on his knees. I had fine work I can tell you to make my way back here through the press though I had my fellows with me and all of us on horseback, but we were as near as may be pulled off our horses, we had to stop and drink at the hands of pretty near all we passed and shout “God bless Queen Mary!” Only the Tower is dark and silent as the tomb in the midst of the burly-hurly,’ – he considered the word askance, then carefully corrected it.
His voice was thick and his eye bloodshot as he dramatised his heroic journey, but his daughter did not recognise these symptoms as any but those of distress. ‘Then, sir,’ she said in a small appealing voice, ‘oh, sir, can’t we leave the Tower too and go home?’
He began to cry, and at that Jane was really frightened, and cried too on a loud wailing note. Her head was spinning. Everything went wrong here, everyone was different – ‘Oh, why, why can’t I go home?’
He pulled himself together, put his arms round her and tried to comfort her, though it was little comfort that he gave.
‘You can’t go home, my child, not yet in any case. We’re the Queen’s prisoners now.’
‘But why? It’s not my fault. I only did as I was told. I never wanted to be Queen.’
‘Tell her that!’ he urged on a sudden note of inspiration. ‘Go to your writing closet now, this instant, and tell her the whole thing – how you were forced into this – by the Dudleys, mind you, not us. We’ve been as helpless as you, my poor innocent child – almost. Your mother, of course, is a masterful woman, never stops reminding one that she’s half a Tudor – but she’d never have done this of herself. It’s all Duke Dudley.’
‘But, sir – I thought it was King Edward.’
‘Of course, of course. But he was a sick, a dying boy, and Dudley had all the power. But none of that concerns you – you knew nothing of it all.’
‘No,’ she said, trying to check her sobs, trying to think through his hot rush of words as his square brown chin-beard wagged up and down, with the light of the candles shining through it and showing hardly any chin beneath. ‘No, I did not know any of this, till three days before you told me to come to the Tower.’
‘Not I,’ he cried angrily, ‘it was Dudley, I tell you.’
‘Well then, he told you to tell me. And as I have always been told to obey my parents, I obeyed.’
The Duke of Suffolk gave up trying to get the wording right. There was something of the mule about his daughter; she got it of her mother. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘it will clear you of any wilful intent and purpose in it. Bring my grey hairs to the block if you will, so long as you go free.’
Jane burst into fresh tears. Why should she be accused of bringing his grey hairs (not that he had any) to the block? It was unfair. It was all so unfair. They had made her do what they wanted, and now they blamed her.
‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ he urged, ‘it may yet come right. Mary can’t last. The Londoners are mad and fickle. They think they want her now, but, in a few months even, they may turn against her.’
His face grew suddenly long and cunning as he sucked in his cheeks and laid a finger against that big important nose of his that always looked as though it were trying to be twice as big and important as any round button of a Tudor nose. ‘Given time,’ he said, ‘and Dudley safe out of the way, if we win only a few months’ grace, we may even yet get another chance.’
But at that Jane became quite wild and hysterical. She did not want any other chance. She would never let herself be made Queen again, never, never. She did not want anything but to go home.
Lady Throckmorton returned from the christening party that night. The crowded rooms that she had left so full of bustle and agitation a few hours before were now empty, silent, stripped of all sign of royalty. She asked a servant where was Queen Jane, and Lord – King Guildford. She was told they were both prisoners.
A letter patent had been left out on a table, either by accident in the wild scurry, or else of intent. Across the royal stamp Mr Cecil had written ‘Jana non Regina’.
CHAPTER NINE
Mary had won. Everyone else thought it a miracle; Mary knew it was one.
Only ten days before, she had set out on her desperate adventure, riding all night with her tiny company of six gentlemen; then in disguise as a peasant woman behind a servant, twenty miles at a stretch through the darkness; then on, with a pause only to change horses and snatch a meal in a quarter of an hour, first to Sawston, the house of a Catholic friend, Mr Huddleston, then to Kenninghall, then to Framlingham; looking ba
ck to see the flames of Huddleston’s house rise flaring across the sky behind her, in revenge for having sheltered her; knowing that her pursuers were within a mile or two of her, that if they had the sense to leave their burning and looting of her supporters’ property they had only to follow and catch herself.
But she rode on, still free, and ‘I’ll build you a better,’ she cried to John Huddleston, who now rode with her.
Could this be herself, a prim old maid, as she was sure her critical young half-sister Elizabeth always thought her; who had had nothing to do for twenty years but wage an endless nagging petty warfare of words, words, words with her father’s and then her young half-brother’s evil counsellors?
Her only chance of adventure had been the hope of slipping away in disguise one night to a boat that would take her across the sea to the Emperor’s dominions where she would be safe from persecution. But she had never taken it – because she feared to? or because she knew the Emperor did not really want her on his hands? or because deep down in her heart she had always hoped that she would get this chance of another, far more glorious adventure? To be Queen of England! It seemed an all but impossible presumption to the woman of thirty-seven whose only opportunity of governance till now had been to visit the cottagers near her, sit down and take a cup of milk or ale while telling them to go on with their meal, seeing what they had for supper, asking after the goodman’s job, his wages, the temper of his master, and the health and schooling and prospects of the children, patting those on the head who could still repeat a Paternoster, despite the opinions of their schoolmaster; and then sending them money or help afterwards incognito.
But now she had set out on an adventure more desperate than that of her Spanish grandmother, Isabella of Castile, who had driven the Moors from Spain; or of her Welsh grandfather, who had landed in England to kill the tyrant Richard III and make himself Henry VII. Their deeds had become the romances of the last century, not possible in these modern days, when money and vulgar opportunism ruled all things. Yet her enterprise was wilder and more forlorn of hope than theirs; she had set out blindly into the night, into a countryside where armies were marching against her, to raise to her side a Kingdom that knew nothing of her.
And she was doing this quite alone, except for the half-dozen gentlemen of her household who rode with her; without any money, any arms, any promise or assurance of support that might come to her, and above all without anyone to advise her.
This last was the worst of all to Mary. Till she was seventeen she had always depended on her mother to tell her what to do; and then, at her death, on her mother’s nephew, the Emperor Charles. But there had been no time to ask his advice, and the behaviour of his ambassadors showed that if there had been, he would have advised most urgently against it. So that added to the excitement was the anxiety lest, instead of acting like a heroine for the first time in her life, she was only behaving like a naughty troublesome child.
Charles V, the solemn young man with the huge chin like a slab of cheese whom Mary had not seen since she had been betrothed to him at six years old, had represented God to her ever since her father had so brutally toppled himself off his divine pedestal. Always her mother had told her the Emperor was the greatest monarch on earth, Lord of the New World and the ancient Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne, head of all temporal power, as the Pope was of all spiritual. Dreadful as it would be if she were taken prisoner and killed (and she had no illusions as to what her fate would be in Dudley’s hands), it would be still more dreadful if the Emperor thought it was all her own fault!
But she rode on and reached Framlingham safely, one of the strongest fortresses in the Kingdom, where she could keep a line of escape open across country to the little Suffolk seaport of Aldeborough, so that if things went too badly she could even yet slip down to the shore and on to a boat and away to the Netherlands and their master, the Emperor – and even if he scolded her, she would still be alive and free.
Her first command was to keep a line of retreat guarded from the Castle all the way to the shore. That showed true generalship, said the country gentlemen who were now there to advise her and to whom she listened as respectfully as to a group of Field Marshals. (‘Hush, my dear, the gentlemen are talking,’ had been a frequent admonition of her mother’s.) So from the top of one or other of the Castle towers she looked out towards the sea, and constantly inspected the defences of her bolt-hole. But it did not prove necessary.
The miracle had begun to happen. Men were coming in to her side. Sir Henry Bedingfeld with 140 of his Suffolk tenantry, fully horsed and armed, and Sir Henry Jerningham with his men of Norfolk had already joined her before she left Kenninghall, so that her six gentlemen-in-waiting had become the nucleus of a tight little force of cavalry. But within two or three days at Framlingham her army had swelled to 13,000, all volunteers; they demanded no pay, but instead brought all provisions with them and, to help her cause, money, plate and jewels. Here was a contrast to Dudley’s beggarly hirelings, at tenpence a day! they said proudly when they heard of the muster against them in Tothill Fields.
Not only were there more and more gentry and some nobles coming in at the head of their tenants, but there were bodies of tenantry, some small, some quite large, without any leader, who had flatly refused to follow their lords and masters to fight for Duke Dudley, and marched off of their own accord to fight for the Lady Mary instead. Some had good weapons of war, shot-guns or the long bows and arrows or cross-bows, others only hay-forks, bill-hooks and other farmers’ implements such as they had marched with a couple of years ago against the New Prayer Book and the Enclosing Act that cut off the land from free grazing for all, as it had been for centuries, and turned it into private parks for the pleasure of the new gentry.
They had been smashed then by the new gentry. This time they might beat them, they might come into their age-old rights by bringing the Lady Mary into hers.
They knew little of her. To most of them she was only a name and a legend, a Princess shut up in Dolorous Guard, oppressed by all these jumped-up gentry because she stuck to the good old ways as her mother had done before her. She was being done out of her rights as they themselves had been. But she had often given good answers to her oppressors.
‘My father made the most part of you out of nothing!’ So she had roared at Dudley, that robber son of a crook lawyer – as any one of her followers would have given his ears for the chance to roar.
‘I know not what you call God’s truth. That is not God’s truth as it was known in my father’s day.’ (That was the way to treat ’em!)
‘I pray you send me back my steward from prison, for I wasn’t brought up as a baker’s daughter to know how many bolls of meal are needed for a dozen loaves, and I cannot start to learn now.’ She had called that out of her window to the Council as they rode off; she’d had the woman’s last word there sure enough!
Old Ridley had had the new clergy’s last word down in her hall when he drank the stirrup-cup she’d sent down for him and then dashed it from his lips, declaring that no true servant of God would drink in such a house.
‘But he’d taken a good sup of her wine first, and made that fine gesture only to her servants after he had been well worsted in argument by herself – mind that!’ said they, nudging each other, chuckling with delight at the Bishop of London’s discomfiture. He himself gave all he had to the poor, but it didn’t alter their opinion of these new clergy as a lot of dry husks, lickpennies to the new landlords – ‘As for the new landlords, why, even one of those greedy-guts will pillage a countryside and never be satisfied, where fifty tun-bellied monks might fill their paunches, but there was always something over for a bite and a sup for anyone who cared to call at the monastery gatehouse.’
All these tales went round and lost nothing in the telling. The Lady Mary had her father’s pluck and humour, her mother’s charity.
‘Ah, good Queen Katherine, she was a saint, she was – would take the clothes off her back to give
to the poor’; but they were glad, too, to know that her daughter was not as careless of her dress as Queen Katherine, who had indeed been apt to look like a charwoman. But Mary had always loved to dress up in gay finery. That was right and proper, and some old men remembered the long fair hair that her father had been so proud of that he’d pulled off the child’s cap to let it tumble down to her waist and show it off to the foreign ambassadors.
They marched to join the ranks of this lady of legend, the oppressed golden-haired Princess of Dolorous Guard.
They found a little woman with a big voice, surprisingly it even recalled that of the obese giant her father – but that was all to the good. They heard her laugh, they did not see her cry. They saw her review her troops on a horse that, startled by their frantic cheering, reared and all but threw her. She was not a good horsewoman and dismounted to finish the review on foot, a meagre little body who bustled along the ranks and showed her almost unbelieving joy and pride in them. She was no princess of fairy-tale after all, but she was old Harry’s daughter right enough and true Tudor. That counted for more than all the rest. The Tudors were a dynasty only two generations old, but they had brought peace and stability to the country after long years of ruinous civil war.
And there were moments these days when one might almost see Mary as beautiful when her rather dim peering eyes lit up at sight of all the new followers, and the sea-wind off the Suffolk coast whipped fresh colour into her faded cheeks, and even her hair, that had begun to grow grey and dull, shone bright again in the high July sunshine. To the women who had been her devoted companions for so long, it seemed that yet another miracle was coming to pass, and that the fair-haired Princess whom her father had petted and adored as a child would now shed the long sad years between, and come into her own as freely and gaily as though she had never despaired of it.
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