The Last Tudor

by Philippa Gregory

  John Jewel, who is friends with all of my sister Jane’s old spiritual mentors, preaches the funeral sermon in reformist style, and I think that Jane might have been pleased to see that her mother was buried in the religion that she died for. It is odd and painful to think of Jane, a queen, her head in a basket, tumbled into the traitors’ vaults in the chapel at the Tower, and here is my mother laid to rest in the greatest of ceremonies, drowned in honors, with banners of arms over her hearse.

  The ladies of the court draped in black, their black leather gloves paid for by the queen, follow my mother’s coffin, which is shrouded in black and cloth of gold, to show her importance.

  Bess St. Loe takes my hand. “I loved your mother very much,” she says to me. “I will miss her. She was a great lady. You can call on me as your friend, Katherine. I will never be able to take her place, but I will love you for her.” For a moment, seeing her emotion, I could almost cry for the loss of a mother; but if you are a Tudor, you don’t really have parents. Your mother is your patron, your child is your heir, you fear the failure of them both. I don’t need Aunt Bess to tell me that my mother was a great lady, and nobody could say that she was a good mother; but it is consoling to see that the court finally recognizes her royalty and thus ours.

  But there is more.

  Elizabeth chooses this moment to restore our title as princesses of the blood. In death, my mother has achieved the ambition of her life: to have us recognized by Elizabeth, named as her cousins, defined as royal, titled as “Princess,” and so the first of all the possible heirs. My mother, God forgive her, would have thought it cheaply bought by her death, well worth the sacrifice. Jane died for claiming our mother’s rights; now they are given to us, her sisters, at her mother’s funeral.

  Mary and I are immensely dignified mourners, our heads held as stiffly as if we are wearing coronets already. I glance behind to make sure that she is upholding our new honors, and I give her a little smile. Her head is up, her shoulders straight, she looks like a miniature queen. We retire after the ceremony to the Charterhouse at Sheen, and I burn with impatience to get back to court to see if at last Elizabeth pays me true cousinly respect, grants me my proper place in the privy chamber, and precedence among the ladies. I should follow her, one pace behind her for the rest of her life, and at her death I should step up to the throne. Now, at last, I can speak to her as a cousin about my marriage.

  “I shall marry as soon as I am out of mourning,” I exult to Mr. Stokes, my stepfather. “We should ask for permission now, while the court is still in black and Elizabeth is in such a generous mood.”

  He looks exhausted. He is genuinely grieved at the loss of his wife. Unlike us, her two surviving children, he truly loved her. “I am sorry,” he says stiffly. “I spoke to Lord Hertford after the funeral. It must be he who speaks to the queen, now that your mother has gone.”

  “Oh, very well. What did Ned say?” I demand confidently. I have Jo the pug on my lap, entwined with Ribbon the little cat, and I gently pull her silky ears. “Does he want to wait till I go back to court after mourning? Or is he going to speak to her now, while we are still away?”

  Adrian Stokes shakes his head, his eyes on my face. “I am sorry,” he says awkwardly. “I am very sorry, Katherine. I know your mother would have been sorry, too. But I don’t think he will undertake it. He said as much to me, actually. Without your mother here to argue your case to the queen, his mother has changed her mind and does not want the match to go ahead. Lady Seymour does not want to speak to the queen without your mother to support her, and neither does he. Put it bluntly: neither of them dares.”

  I can hardly believe what he is saying. “But she has just made me a princess of the blood!” I exclaim. “She recognizes me as a member of the royal family! I have never been so high in her favor!”

  “That’s the very thing,” he replies. “Now you are named a princess she will be all the more determined to command your marriage, and she won’t want you to marry someone with a claim to the throne himself.”

  “To Hertford!” I raise my voice to my stepfather. “She should command my marriage to Hertford! And you should insist on it for me!”

  He shakes his head. “You know that I have no influence, Lady Katherine. I am a commoner without great wealth. But I know that the queen won’t want to marry you to a lord who has his own claim to the throne. And she won’t let you marry while she is unmarried herself, and risk you having a son who would have a stronger claim than she does. I can see what the Seymours are thinking: obviously the queen won’t want a Tudor-Seymour boy at court until she has a husband and son of her own. The Seymours don’t want to take the risk of offending her.”

  “None of you understand her!” I exclaim. “She doesn’t think like that; she doesn’t plan ahead like that! All she thinks of is being at the center of attention and holding Robert Dudley at her side.”

  “I think she does think very carefully,” he cautions me. “I think she is having you watched, and I think she will take no risks that might create an heir with a strong claim to her throne.”

  “Elizabeth doesn’t watch me!”

  “William Cecil does.” He sees the shock on my face and gives a helpless little shrug. “He watches everyone.”

  “Are you saying that she will not let me marry till she has married and given birth to her own son and heir?”

  He nods. “Almost certainly,” he says. “It would be to set up an heir with a stronger claim than her own.”

  “That could be years.”

  “I know. But I think she will not endure a rival.”

  “She will be the ruin of me,” I say flatly.

  His sandy eyebrows come together in a frown as he wonders what I mean by “ruin.” “I hope not,” he says. “I hope that you have been careful both with your reputation and with the queen.”

  I think of the arbor, I think of the moment of fierce pain and joy, I think of sobbing against his shoulder and whispering, “I am all yours.”

  “We are betrothed to marry!” I say.

  “It is traditional to have the queen’s permission,” he reminds me gently. “It was the law. The queen could restore the law. But anyway, the Seymours say they won’t ask for it.”

  “What about my mother’s letter, asking the queen for permission for Ned and me to marry? I can give it to Elizabeth if no one else has the courage to present it. We can say we found it in her papers, that it was her dying wish?”

  His tired face darkens. “That letter,” he says. “That’s how I know that you’re being watched. Your mother’s letter has gone from her private closet. Your mother was spied on, and someone has stolen her letter. For your own safety, Katherine, you have to forget all about this.”

  “They can’t just steal a letter to the queen! They can’t just go through our papers and take what they want. Who would do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why. But at any rate it’s gone, and we can’t get it back. I think you can do nothing but put him out of your thoughts and out of your heart.”

  “I can’t forget!” I exclaim. “I love him. I have given him my word! We are betrothed!”

  “I am sorry” is all he says. And then he says something even worse: “He is sorry, too, I know. I could tell. He was very sorry that he will never see you again.”

  “Not see me again?” I whisper. “He said that?”

  “He said that.”

  We are very quiet and dull at Sheen. Mr. Nozzle shivers in the cold drafts from the ill-fitting doors and Ribbon the cat will not go out for his business and get his paws wet, so I am always clearing up after him. Jo the pug whimpers the moment that I leave the room, as if to say she is lonely, too.

  At least I have not missed a merry Christmas at court. Janey writes to me and says that the place is as miserable as when Queen Mary was on the throne, for Elizabeth is sick with fright as to whether she dares to send English troops to support the Scots Protestant lords. Of course she should d
o so. This would be a courageous thunderclap, bringing the gospel to people who will never hear it unless she acts. But Elizabeth will not follow the path of righteousness, and she is afraid of the Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, the new French queen. The French will invade to support their kinswoman against the rebellion of the Scots Protestant lords, and once they are in Scotland what is to stop them marching south on Elizabeth? My sister Jane would have sent an army of saints to support the godly lords against a papist regent in a moment. So too would any strong monarch of England. But Elizabeth believes nothing in her heart, and will not fight a war of religion. Worst of all for her is that William Cecil, a reformer as fierce as anyone in my family, has said that if she will not accept his advice to support our faith in Scotland, he will not offer it, and he has left court and gone home to his wife, Mildred.

  “Elizabeth will be hopeless without him,” I say to Mary, reading this to her, the two of us in our mother’s privy chamber with icy rain pouring down the leaded-glass windows. “I daresay she will lose the throne if the French march against her.”

  “They are certain to invade, aren’t they? If she declares war against them in Scotland? They will invade across the Narrow Seas in the south and come down from Scotland at the same time.”

  I nod, deciphering Janey’s urgent scribble. “And she doesn’t have an army,” I say. “Or any money to raise one. As long as she doesn’t send Ned to Edinburgh!” I say. “Does this say Hertford?”

  “No,” Mary says. “Howard. It says Elizabeth is sending her cousin Thomas Howard to Edinburgh. Ned is safe.”

  I clasp my hands together as if I would fall into prayer on the window seat. “Oh God, if I could only go back to court and be with him! If I could just see him!”

  “If the French invade England, it will be to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, not you,” Mary observes.

  “I don’t want the throne!” I say irritably. “Why does nobody ever understand that? I just want Ned.”

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

  SPRING 1560

  I say that I don’t want the throne, but I cannot prevent a flare of ambition when I return to Whitehall to find myself an honored member of the court, as I should always have been. The queen’s principal advisor, William Cecil, has won the argument about supporting the Scots Protestants, and is back in his place, pressing for an English army to go to Scotland, urging the rights of the Protestants—well aware that I am the Protestant heir. He always bows and exchanges a brief word of greeting with me, as if I am of interest to him now, as if he thinks that the time might come when he is my advisor, and Elizabeth is gone.

  I am the favorite of the whole palace. I am a beloved royal princess, no longer a despised visitor. I am not a neglected poor relation but the recognized heir to the kingdom. I have the strange sensation of being in a place that I know well and yet everything is different. There is a new reality behind the costumed smiles, as if it is Act Two of a masque and the actors have changed their faces behind their shields and the same people must now be taken as completely different.

  My cousin Margaret Douglas has offended the queen deeply. A servant of her husband, Matthew Stuart, has been caught reminding the French ambassador that Margaret is next of kin to our cousin Mary Queen of France and Scotland, and her husband, as Earl of Lennox, is heir to the throne of Scotland. This is obviously true, but anyone could have warned her that such a message would be reported at once, and Elizabeth would be frightened and furious. Margaret should have played on her main strength of being extremely plain, and old, and then perhaps Elizabeth would have forgiven her royal blood. Anyway, the court is hugely amused that William Cecil is ordered to rifle through old documents, stored away in the muniments room, to prove that Margaret Douglas, the daughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Queen of Scotland, is, in fact, illegitimate, and so neither she nor her pretty son Henry Stuart can have any claim to the throne of England. As though her reputation could be worse than Elizabeth’s, whose mother was beheaded for adultery with five named men!

  I thank God that nobody can question my paternity. I descend in a straight and legitimate line from King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, married to his best friend, Charles Brandon, through my mother, the unimpeachably virtuous and bad-tempered Frances Brandon, and now that I am in favor again, my resemblance to my beautiful royal grandmother is suddenly apparent. Many people remark to each other that I am as pretty as the Tudor princess, and admire my fair York coloring.

  Robert Dudley, who is in and out of the privy chamber, and openly admitted to the royal bedroom, declared as the queen’s most trusted friend, is courteous to me as a kinsman. Our families overlap so often—he was the brother-in-law of my sister Jane, and so a brother-in-law to me—he is the most favored suitor to my cousin the queen, and is now happy to remember our kinship. Suddenly, I have friends, where before I was living among strangers. I could almost think myself widely liked and generally admired. I start to say “my cousin the queen” just as my mother did, and Mary laughs at me behind her little hand.

  But my triumphant return to court, my discovery of so many new friends, even the favor of the queen, does not compensate me for the loss of Ned. The young man who claimed me freely, of his own will, as his lover, who sought the blessing of his mother and the permission of mine, now walks past me as if he does not see me, and when we are accidentally face-to-face, he bows to me as if we are nothing more than polite acquaintances.

  The first time that his cool gaze goes over me and beyond, I think that I will faint with unhappiness. It is only Mary at my elbow, her head not reaching my shoulder, who keeps me upright. She pinches my arm so hard that she leaves a bruise and she mutters at me: “Head up! Chin up!”

  I glance at her, completely bewildered, and she beams up at me and adds: “Heels down! Hold tight,” like our father when he was teaching us to ride, and that recalls me to myself. I walk with my hand on her shoulder and I can barely make my feet take one step after another. We go to chapel together, she supporting me as if I am sick, and when I kneel behind the queen, I bow my head and ask God to release me from this pain.

  I am so bitterly unhappy to think that Ned has given me up to avoid the displeasure of a queen who would never sacrifice her own pleasures. Elizabeth allows herself joy in her lover, but I may not even speak to the man that I love. I watch her as she beckons Robert Dudley to lift her down from her horse, or dance with her in the evening, when she walks with her head practically resting on his shoulder, and summons him to her privy chamber where they are left alone together, and I find I hate her for her selfishness, for thinking only of her own pleasure and never thinking of me. I blame her bitterly that I am parted from the man I love, and I will die a lonely spinster, while she indulges herself in a shameful adulterous public love affair.

  Now, she publicly swears that she will marry the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand as soon as he comes to England—she promises that she will make a Spanish alliance to keep England safe—but it is obvious to everyone that she is lying, and that any husband of hers would be cuckolded before his ship had even docked at Greenwich.

  The Spanish have learned this now. The new ambassador is offended, his household sulky. William Cecil is quite distracted, trying to maintain our friendship with the great power of Spain to balance the great threat from France. The Spanish ambassador, Álvaro de la Quadra, finds himself beside me as we walk by the river towards a lighted arbor where we are going to listen to some poetry one evening, and he mentions that the archduke has heard of my beauty and would far rather marry me than go through the long-drawn-out and discredited process of courting Elizabeth. One day I might be a great Queen of England with the archduke at my side and Spanish power behind me. In the meantime I could be a treasured archduchess with an envied place at the English court, the center of papist ambitions.

  “Oh, I couldn’t say,” I whisper. I am horrified that he should dare to say this so clearly to me. Thank God no one is
in hearing and no one has seen us but one of William Cecil’s men, who happens to pass by. “Your Excellency, you do me too much honor. I cannot hear such things without the permission of my cousin the queen.”

  “No need to mention it to her,” he replies swiftly. “I spoke to you in confidence, so you understand what might be. If you wished it.”

  “Really, I don’t wish for anything,” I assure him.

  It’s true. I don’t wish for the throne anymore. I want to be a wife, not a furiously bad-tempered spinster queen. I want a husband, and none but Ned. I could not bear the touch of another man’s hand. If I live until I am ancient, if I live until I am as old as fifty, I will never want anyone but him. We pass each other in the gallery, at dinner, on the way to chapel, in miserable silence. I know that he loves me still. I see him look across at me when he is at chapel and I have my face covered in my hands so he cannot see me peeping through my fingers at him. He looks as if he is ill with longing, and I am not allowed to comfort him.

  “I swear to you, he loves you as much as ever,” Janey says mournfully. “He’s pining away, Katherine. But my mother has forbidden him to speak to you and warned him of the queen’s displeasure if she knew. I can’t bear it that you’re not together. I tell him that he has a worse illness than I do. And his cure is just here! You are the cure for his illness.”

  “If only your mother would speak to Elizabeth!” I say.

  Janey shakes her head. “She doesn’t dare. She told me that the Privy Council has told Elizabeth that she must find a safe husband for you at once. With English troops mustered to fight against the French in Scotland they are terrified that you will come out against her, or even leave the country. They are frightened that the Spanish will take you. They want you safely buried in marriage to a low-born Englishman who will keep you home and diminish your claim.”