Her Highness, the Traitor

by Susan Higginbotham

  ***

  At Dorset House, our servants dutifully came out to greet us, but there was no sign of my husband, although I had sent word we would be arriving. “Where is the marquis?”

  Harry’s steward said, “He is at a meeting of the king’s council, my lady.”

  “The council? He is not a member of it.”

  “He is as of today, my lady.”

  I looked over at Jane. There was no need to ask whether she had heard this news; for once, she looked as bewildered as I did.

  “It has something to do with this business of the Protector being removed from office, my lady. Out with the old, in with the new.”

  I nodded, grateful that thanks to George Medley, I knew what he was talking about.

  Harry came home a few hours later. “The king’s esteemed and trusted councilor, at your service,” he said, sweeping a bow after he had embraced all of us. “A sudden change, eh? Well, I must tell you how it came about. The Protector—”

  “Your brother told me about that,” I said crisply. “It is a good thing someone deigned to, or I would be in utter confusion at the moment.”

  Harry smiled sheepishly. “My dear, I meant—”

  “Never mind that now. What happened?”

  “It’s simple, really. The Earl of Warwick and a couple of his friends approached me. Told me that it was a disgrace that a man of my rank and religious sympathies wasn’t on the council—and there you go, on the council! I don’t flatter myself that the earl suddenly was overcome with respect for my wisdom, mind you. Truth is, with Somerset in the Tower and some of his allies booted off the council, it’s too lopsided in favor of those who want to go back to the old religion. The king doesn’t have much use for the Protector, especially after being hauled to Windsor like a hostage, but he does have strong feelings against the old religion, and Warwick prefers the new himself. So here I am, and about time, I must say.”

  “Harry, I am glad you are a councilor; do not mistake me. I think it is about time, too. But do you think the Protector will be executed?”

  “Hard to say. Warwick at least doesn’t want him executed, and he seems to be the man in charge at the moment. He’s been ill, so the council’s been meeting at his home over at Ely Place.”

  “You trust Warwick? After all, wasn’t he Somerset’s friend?”

  My husband shrugged. “He was. Still is, perhaps. But Warwick’s first allegiance is to the king.” Harry looked at me more closely. “Mary hasn’t been poisoning you against him, has she?”

  The most unstable man in England, I heard Mary’s voice telling me. “She doesn’t like him,” I acknowledged.

  “No wonder, with her insisting that she be privileged above everyone else in England to hear the Mass! You didn’t stoop to that, did you?”

  “Oh, no,” I lied, and I was glad to see that Jane shook her head with equal vehemence.

  ***

  When I had told Adrian Stokes that Harry seldom came to my bed, I had been exaggerating, but not by much. It was true having Mary had nearly killed me and left her slightly misshapen, but I had recovered quickly, and no one had told me I couldn’t have another baby. And it wasn’t as if Harry were consistent, anyway. When he felt like sleeping with me, he seemed to be able to put aside his worries about my health easily enough. He just didn’t feel like sleeping with me all that often. I could console myself that he didn’t seem to feel like sleeping with anyone else, either, as I’d never seen signs that he had a mistress or consorted with whores, but on nights when I longed to feel a man’s arms around me, it wasn’t much consolation.

  Tonight, however, Harry paid me a visit. Usually I welcomed him, but tonight I resisted his attempts to remove my night shift. “You didn’t tell me about the Protector, Harry. Why?”

  “Really, my dear, it was just a foolish omission.”

  “Yet you told Jane.”

  “Well, yes. She is interested in that type of thing.”

  “And what makes you think I am not? I am not a dolt, Harry. But in any case, I am your wife and have been for sixteen years. I should hear these things from you, whether or not you think I am interested in them.”

  “Well, yes,” Harry conceded. “There’s logic in that.” He grinned at me. “I’ve rarely seen you angry at me, Frances. It makes you rather interesting.”

  I snorted, and Harry drew me to him, then removed my clothing and began to caress me in a manner that made me gasp and clutch him to me. He was not always so attentive to my own desires, and if this was the result of the council’s promotion of him—well, the council deserved the heartiest thanks. Perhaps it was also his way of apologizing; if so, I would accept it.

  But as I climaxed, my mind was not on Harry. It was, I realized to my shame, on Adrian Stokes.

  13

  Jane Dudley

  December 1549

  The council has agreed that you can see your husband on Christmas Day,” I told the Duchess of Somerset.

  “Only for that one day? I had hoped for more.”

  “It is the best I can do,” I snapped. “Really, as there are members of the council who would like to put him to death, I consider it a victory of sorts.”

  Anne lowered her eyes. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I am sorry. I truly am grateful beyond words for what you have been able to do for us. It is just that I miss him so much, and I fret so about him. You cannot know what it is like, not knowing whether he will be alive a month from now.” She brushed a hand across her eyes, which did show the signs of many sleepless nights.

  I patted her other hand. “The men who want his death are in the decided minority, I am told.”

  The duchess bristled. “Why should anyone want my dear Edward’s death? He has done nothing, except to be too kind and forbearing to the peasants.” She rose from the chair in my chamber in which she had been sitting. “But I must go and make ready for my visit. There is so much to do. Do you think the guards will let me bring in my jam for him? And some new shirts and handkerchiefs?”

  “I am sure of it. In fact,” I added archly, “you might want to get some new things for yourself, as well. You will want to look your best. The council has agreed that you may be alone with him when you visit.”

  Anne let out a girlish squeal of pleasure. Then she kissed me lightly on the cheek and hurried away.

  ***

  A few days later, John developed a fever, which confined him to his bed. After a miserable day, he was at last on the verge of resting for the night when a knock sounded on his chamber door and William Paulet, Lord St. John, was announced. “Tell him to come back at another time,” I said to our servant. “My lord is ill.”

  “My lady, Lord St. John says it’s urgent.”

  I sighed. All the commotion at our house that had taken place since Somerset’s removal had given me a certain appreciation for the man’s burden of office. I might have protested further, but John said sleepily, “Well, send him in, then,” and sat up. Quickly, I helped him adjust his nightcap to more statesmanlike effect.

  “My lord—my lady—I apologize for coming at this bad time. But I did not think this could wait.” John nodded for him to keep talking, and Paulet continued, “Today I accompanied the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Arundel to the Tower, to interrogate the Duke of Somerset, as you instructed. To several questions, he stated that he had acted by your advice and counsel.”

  “No doubt he did, in some instances,” John said wearily. He coughed.

  “After we left the duke, my lord, the Earl of Southampton said that you and he should both be found traitors, and that you were both worthy to die.”

  I rose. “My lord!”

  “Go on,” John said.

  “The Earl of Arundel agreed. They talked a little more and decided that on the day the Duke of Somerset was executed, you
would be arrested and put in his chambers at the Tower. Then you would soon be tried yourself, and, undoubtedly, executed.”

  “Undoubtedly,” agreed John. “Is there more?”

  “They talked of having the lady Mary made regent, my lord, but I didn’t get the sense that they had approached her. The long and short of it, they want Somerset dead, and you with them.”

  “That information was worth disturbing my sickbed for,” said John calmly. He squeezed my trembling hand and smiled at Paulet. “I shall keep it in mind. But for now, my lord, I must get some sleep, or the Earl of Southampton won’t have to take the trouble of plotting against me.”

  ***

  John slept that night; I didn’t. It was the Earl of Southampton—Thomas Wriothesley—who had interrogated Anne Askew, even turning the rack himself, it was said, when she was not forthcoming with the information Wriothesley sought. What he had sought was information that would link Catherine Parr herself, and some of her ladies as well, to what had then been regarded as heretical practices. I had been one of those women who stood in danger, for I had possessed books, passed around among us ladies-in-waiting and read aloud in the queen’s chambers, that were illegal then. Anne Askew’s brave silence in the face of torture had surely saved some of the rest of us from the flames.

  Unable to get Anne Askew to implicate anyone, those who wished to see a return to the old religion had tried another tack—turning King Henry against the queen herself, even to the point of procuring an order for her arrest. It had failed miserably when the queen, advised of her enemies’ schemes, had groveled so humbly, and so cleverly, before the king, he had turned on the ones who had sought to destroy her. It would have been almost comical to see the king throwing the arrest warrant in Wriothesley’s own face, had we not been aware of how close Catherine might have come to sharing the fate of her predecessor: poor Katherine Howard.

  And now Wriothesley had my husband in his sights. “Why would they want to execute you and the duke?” I demanded the next morning as soon as John awoke.

  John shrugged and obediently swallowed the physic he had been given. “Terrible stuff. Simple, my dear. Wriothesley has held a grudge against Somerset since being deprived of his office as Lord Chancellor after the old king died. I stood with Somerset at that time, so he bears a grudge against me, as well. As for Arundel, he’s probably hoping for a restoration of the old religion—hence the lady Mary.”

  “John, what shall you do?”

  “Enjoy the Christmas festivities as much as I can in my state of health.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Wriothesley’s a fool. If he could only count, he’d know that there aren’t enough men of his stamp on the council to send Somerset to the block, or me either. I shall beat him at his own game, never you fear.” John looked at me straight on, and for the first time I saw real anger in his eyes. “And speaking of fear, I have never forgotten the fright he gave Queen Catherine, or you and the rest of her ladies. When I take him down, I promise you, you shall be there to see it.”

  ***

  The Duke and Duchess of Somerset had their Christmas visit, and afterward went to hear a sermon at the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula—sitting on the same pew, the guards later told us, without so much as an inch between them, and gazing into each other’s eyes more than into their respective prayer books. The next day, Somerset’s children by Anne—he had eight living at the time, all of them under the age of twelve—paid their father a noisy visit. Uxorious as the duke was, he was rather less at ease among the brood of offspring that had resulted from his marriage, and I suspected he might have found his Tower lodgings peaceful after the last of them straggled out of the fortress’s walls.

  Then, as December was about to fade into January, the council met once more in a conference chamber at our house, where John, wrapped from head to toe in furs against the sharp cold, croaked his way through the proceedings as I, at his bidding, brought physic in from time to time and plumped the pillows at his back. The meeting had been droning on for some time, the pillows were no longer plump but downright fat, and I was beginning to run out of excuses to stay in the room, when Wriothesley said, “My lords, now that the New Year is almost upon us, we must decide what to do about the traitor.”

  “Traitor?” asked Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset. A newcomer to the council, he had contributed little to it thus far, but did occasionally make remarks like this to remind the rest of the council he was still breathing.

  “I refer, of course, to the Duke of Somerset.”

  “He’s an incompetent,” said William Parr. A flush passed over his handsome features as he remembered his own ignominious performance at Norwich before John had been appointed to clean up the situation. “But not a traitor,” he continued lamely. “And I say this as a man whose own marriage he tried to invalidate.”

  “He is a traitor,” said the Earl of Arundel. “What else would you call a man who all but handed the government over to the rabble?”

  “Look at these,” said Southampton. He waved a sheath of papers: the charges to which the duke had agreed to plead guilty. Everyone in the council room looked up obediently, as did I from placing a warm brick against John’s feet. “Are these not the admissions of a traitor?”

  “There is no treason in any of the charges against Somerset,” said John. “Only folly and mismanagement.”

  “The man has acted traitorously; he must suffer the fate of traitors. It is time we started proceedings to attaint him, and to sentence him to death.”

  “You seek his blood, my lord?”

  “Haven’t I made it clear enough? I do.”

  “Do you seek mine also?”

  “I—”

  John rose and placed the hand on the sword that was propped up against his chair. “Know this, my lord: I am well aware that he who seeks his blood seeks mine, as well. You shall have neither, I tell you.”

  He had never raised his voice. No one else in the room spoke. Then Southampton rose from his seat, his chair scraping the floor as he moved it backward the only sound in the room. Without a word, he left the room. Another chair scraped backward, and the Earl of Arundel followed.

  No one else stirred from his seat. After a moment or two, John sat back down. “Shall we turn to the next order of business, gentlemen?”

  ***

  That night, I saw John off to bed as I always did when he was ill, not trusting his comfort to our servants, devoted and competent as they were. Having seen that everything in his chambers was to my satisfaction, I kissed him good night and walked to my own chambers, where my ladies helped me to undress. (It amused me sometimes to remember there was a time not so long ago when I’d done that and almost everything else for myself.) It was an ordinary night, and yet as my ladies brushed out my long, heavy dark hair and braided it for bed, I sensed what had happened in that council meeting had changed our lives forever.

  My husband, John Dudley, son of a man who had died upon the scaffold, held the rule of England in his hands.

  14

  Frances Grey

  June 1550 to August 1550

  Do I have to come?” asked Jane, laying down the wedding invitation we had received. “I am extremely busy with my translation.”

  “Of course you have to come,” I said. “It will be the grandest wedding seen in years. The king himself will be there.”

  Jane looked at Harry, who nodded. “I’m afraid your mother is right this time, my girl. Duty calls. Besides, you haven’t seen the king in a while.”

  “There will be dancing and masques and a tournament,” I said coaxingly.

  Jane looked unimpressed, but Kate, coming up in the middle of our conversation, said, “A grand wedding? Whose, Mother?”

  “Anne, the eldest daughter of the Protector—”

  “Frances,” Harry prodded.


  “The Duke of Somerset,” I corrected myself. I had found it hard to break the habit of calling him by his former title. “She is marrying the Earl of Warwick’s eldest son, Lord Lisle.” Somerset had been freed from the Tower in February and, after a brief period of house arrest, had been restored to the king’s council, albeit in a position subordinate to Warwick, who as head of the king’s council was now known as the Lord President. “This marriage is proof of their good will to each other.”

  “I can come, can’t I?”

  “Of course you can, and Mary, too. The entire family has been invited.”

  “Good,” said Kate. “The Earl of Hertford will be there, don’t you think? He’s good-looking.”

  “Is that all you think of, Kate?” Jane asked. “At your young age?”

  “He is a good-looking boy,” I said of Somerset’s oldest son. “It is no harm to say so.”

  “Perhaps as proof of good will between the Duke of Somerset and our family, a match could be made between one of us and the Earl of Hertford,” Kate said. “Preferably me, as Jane is above such things.”

  “It is not your place to suggest matches for yourself,” said Jane.

  “Jane—” I began.

  “Well, why not? That way, Jane is saved for the king, and I can marry an agreeable boy.”

  “There is no intention of marrying Jane to the king, or any of you girls to anyone just yet,” Harry said. “Negotiations are afoot to marry the king to a French princess. As for the rest of you, Jane is correct. All of this speculation is unbecoming for maidens.”

  Behind her father’s back, Kate stuck her tongue out at Jane, who magnificently ignored her. I should have reproved Kate, I suppose, but I did not.

  ***

  “They can marry off all of Warwick’s boys to all of Somerset’s girls if they like, but does Warwick really think that Somerset’s going to be content with being a humble member of the council?” Katherine Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, asked as we waited for the king to appear at Sheen, which he had offered for the wedding. “Like it or not, he’s still a duke, and the king’s only living uncle. He can’t forget it. Neither should Warwick. And where is Warwick, by the way?”